Activism on Human Rights?

Activism on “Human Rights

“Ad passions: Passion is the exact opposite of action. As courage is the virtue of action, so endurance is the virtue of passion. Passion is always connected with love; the man of action – Achilles – knows love only as desire, and it then plays a minor role. Ulysses, the much enduring one, knows love as passion; the gods play on him.” – Hannah Arendt (Notebooks, April 1955, 31)

The nature of armed conflict, though wars have existed for as long as human history is recorded, doubtless has been transformed in the course of the past century more than it did in the hundreds of years that antedated the modern era. One would like to think that this has to do indirectly with the technical possibilities that modern science afforded warfare and the development of state-of-the-art weaponry that enabled parties engaged in conflict to launch an attack on the enemy battlefield from a distant point in space, eliminating by proxy the need and risk of engaging in what is now considered old-fashioned body battles. It does not mean that the damage typical of warfare might decrease in any way nor that body battles will no longer take place – they still account for a vast overwhelming majority of the casualties in armed conflicts in the developing world. While it is true that technical possibilities afforded are part of the answer, they do not constitute the whole truth on what truly distinguishes contemporary warfare from its predecessors, for to a greater or lesser degree, advance in the development of weaponry has been a constant since the age of stone – unfathomable as its modern proportions might be.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence – “If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view[1]”. It is precisely this, the fact that wars are now public spectacles providing for living room sights and sounds, what most assuredly distinguishes the contemporary warfare scene from any previous scenarios. The invention of the daguerreotype, cheered as the greatest invention of all by painters and reporters alike, and the subsequent evolution into the modern journalist camera transformed the realities of war for the public space more than the realities of war were in themselves transformed. The first important wars that the lens of the reporters captured were the Crimean War and the American Civil War but it wasn’t until the First and Second World War that the camera’s ken reached out for actual combat. Needless to explain, photography and reporting became a constitutive element of the practice of warfare from within, as we know from the horrors committed by the Nazis that they themselves recorded without a bit of ludicrousness and that thus have reached our secondary school textbooks and prime time documentaries. Photography, from the simple accounting of day to day training exercises to the more technologically advanced air and satellite photography, has become an indispensable element in strategy. Photography however related to, is already distant from the true nature of the phenomena that come hand in hand with armed conflict today. “The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to new tele-intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and re-diffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.[2]”

There has been ever since an endless number of wars and conflicts ripe with murder and brutality that we have witnessed from the comfort of our screens, interrupted by prime-time adds in the middle of the evening news featuring a complex conundrum of sexual, commercial and envy-rich images that make up for the texture of the rather impoverished modern imagination. Before or after the images of war and destruction we have watched the sports sections or the elongated and smile-ridden plotlines of gossip and entertainment for which we have so long waited and on account of which we have born the mortally dreadful graphic spans of mutilated corpses, ailing children and screaming women. At this point it would be worthwhile noting that the only war in the academic definition thereof we have been witness to since Vietnam, has been the decade long armed conflict in the Balkan countries; but weapons have been hardly put down and though the general status quo of the world, beautiful as it is, has been quietly maintained, a certain halo of uncertainty has visited vast regions of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America in which the number of bullets worthy of being called war have run free through the streets and have visited at home through our satellite dishes and sometimes helped us fall sleep or caused our take-away meals to burn in the stove.

Next to the journalist, that new international traveler of cameras and shorts often indistinguishable from a tourist, a new creature begot in the 19^th century with the creation of the Red Cross but only matured and fully fashioned in the course of the 20^th, caught our attention throughout the photographs, the news and the reports from war zones, and that creature is the human rights activist. We saw them first marginally strolling around the photographs in the guises of nurses after the fashion of a Florence Nightingale and Simone Weil of sorts, carrying the wounded into improvised tents and caring for the dying, translating letters and smiling prudently without deference to the intruder lens. In the first metamorphosis of the human rights activist, at the height of the 1960’s and particularly during the Vietnam War, we saw them closer to the lenses than before and becoming richer in prominence, voice and color until we also heard them speak and then scream out loud for the unaccountable number of lives that might have been lost here and elsewhere. The Romantic picture of the activist permeated with grandeur the psyche of TV and radio across Western Europe and North America portraying them as young idealists fighting for the cause of a better world and more often than not putting their lives at risk in the battlefield, serving as human shields and giving their time and resources for those less privileged, whom in many cases they never saw as equals but rather as the infinitely inferior savage in dire need to be protected. Ideology non-withstanding, many of these men and women made a difference in the world and contributed greatly to the re-establishment of peace and order beyond the national boundaries of armies and even the international boundaries of relief organizations that turned help into a full-fledged profession with hierarchies of career, domain and power intimately associated with the armies and the higher circles of power, domestic or otherwise, when existing.

Unlike the different professions employed in the cause of war as much as in the deterrence thereof and final establishment of peace and order, there has never been a clear voice for what a human rights activist is actually ought to do or think even. In our days, after the internet, when the images of armed conflict, repression, violence and strife do not only reach us through the printed press or TV screens but bombard us from much closer, in our mobile phones as we ride in crowded trains, drink cocktails after lunch or make love at night, we are both more aware and less sensitive to the spectacle of human suffering. The increasingly advantageous situation of the information age that make every bit of information available for everyone at any time or the day or the night had graduated in every city of the world a new breed of activists that send letters of members of the parliament, post pictures in their local college boards, print t-shirts with the cause of Nepal or Timor, organize live forums with participants speaking simultaneously from five different hour zones and crowd in front of embassies and international missions. The era of social media has made this even more dramatic but less straining, for now it is not only that it is not necessary to save money from one’s own pocket or stand in the cold in front of an embassy in a far away capital district, but it is also not necessary to leave the living room where the sights and sounds of war have contacted us first and it is possible to be an activist while listening to our favorite music, with a cozy blanket over our legs and a sleeping hat from childhood days.

Facebook and Twitter have made these phenomena possible. So that the person who shares a few hours of the day, preferably after work, can be an activist for every possible cause and this is not necessarily a bad thing. What is then the purpose of activism for human rights, if any? My criticism to the current wave of online activism is not that it shouldn’t be done but that as long-time activists who were in the field once know so well, activism is a matter of principle more than it is a matter of opinions. People can become sensitive to distress happening elsewhere, in a part of the world he has probably not visited and never will and with which he bears no historical or emotional attachment whatsoever, accordingly, the graphic and massive nature of media nowadays make this uncannily possible. What I mean to say by giving preference to principle over opinions is that opinions are often passionate and passion like Hannah Arendt championed in the course of her life and in her philosophical work, is the number one enemy of action. Many people, opinionated and passionate as they are about causes, are impaired for political action and action as such is different in nature from protest and revolution but identical with power; these passionate believers in causes for one people or another are moved by sentiments such as love, love for the world, for peoples and causes, and love as the most worldless of all feelings builds bridges in between private peoples that destroy the public spaces between them and annihilates the virtuousness of political action as the discursive arena of truth – truth not as Thomistic pre-condition for thinking but as the attitude that precedes and results from thinking. Thinking here being identical with being and with opinions and non-identical with acting, appearing in the world and engaging in truth with others, politically or otherwise.

People, who are passionate about causes and have opinions, are generally not engaged in action and are not political activists but rather fulfill the positions of priests giving the ailments to a mortally ill nation or people as a whole. They will clench their firsts easily; online and perhaps even in the real world against those many that disagree with their opinions or might as well not care or even bother to locate Bahrain in a map of the world. Activism as a form of political action is something equivalent to power and should never even remotely be confused with violence, because once political action is violent is no longer political or action but violence alone – be this violence physical or emotional, close or distant, and alas, any form of incivility, is a breach of power and the subtle conversion to violence. “The difference between power and violence lies in that 1. Violence is measurable and calculable and, on the other hand, power is imponderable and incalculable. This is what makes power such a “terrible” force, but it is there precisely where its eminently human character lies. 2. Power always grows in between men, whereas violence can be possessed by one man alone. If “power is seized” power itself is destroyed and only violence is left. 3. From the above follows that violence is always objective; it is identical with the means that it utilizes –forces – whereas power comes to life only through action itself and is constituted by action. It can vanish in any moment, it is pure unmediated action. A modern example of how power helped to destroy violence is Ghandi. He never advocated for an impotence of the Christian kind. He rather thought that the power of the masses in India is the only thing that could bring British violence to an end.[3]” This power does not belong to the opinions but to the people that have detected the collapsing structures of power timely enough to replace them with action and therefore as in the case of Egypt and Tunisia, throwing themselves overboard to the most reckless uncertainty out of which political institutions consequent with political acts can eventually emerge but this is not necessarily granted.

An activist for human rights is not necessarily a politician as much as he is not a journalist who blindly obeys the command of spreading information about every possible heinous crime on earth or in that specific part of the world towards which his love is targeted and awaits the human race to agree with him unabatedly at the risk of severing the channels of communication whenever consensus is absent. It is not about opinions as much as it is about a principle and that principle is not even necessarily the universal demands of equality and fairness and justice that have failed to deliver for most of mankind. It is but a principle of civility in which rather than harboring opinions the person is capable of acting in such a way that violence is not the result of his provocation toward power and therefore he remains committed to empowering peoples rather than furthering the destruction of the already severed channels between them. An activist who is incapable of acting out within the boundaries of civility, regardless of his personal private thoughts, in times of conflict and war when the altruistic examples of humanity are most needed and occur most naturally between people because of the crowded space of opinion and truth and why not, suffering, generated between them, will be all the less able to commit to civility in times of peace and will continue in the search for strong opinions whitewashed as truth in the name of the weak powers that break easily as the wind turns elsewhere and unavoidably will support outbursts of violence of any kind that will emerge as the consequence of hold opinions and not principles as revolutionary ideals.

Opinions are fundamental items in the market of truth and they consolidate truth in a way other than self-servingly but they should not be upheld as truths themselves; for it is no surprise that truth and politics have never been the best friends or necessarily partners at all and politics stems from incontrollable actions of men held together rather than from a founding principle other than the simple fact of being born into the world in a community of men and the desire to transform this togetherness into the civic separation that allows for a world to emerge. Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor during the 16^th century is said to have coined the expression “fiat iustitia et pereat mundus” (let justice be done, though the world shall perish) that was mocked by Arendt into “fiat veritas et pereat mundus” (let truth prevail, though the world shall perish) that can be easily applied to the comfortable truth seekers of the internet age but the world, as far as I know, is bigger than the news. “What is called in news parlance “the world” – “You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world,” one radio networks intones several times an hour – is (unlike the world) a very small place, both geographically and thematically, and what is thought worth knowing about it is expected to be transmitted tersely and emphatically. Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view.[4]” The pursuit of information as truth has replaced the complex and serendipitous process of learning history and human thought, of reflecting behind the shade of images and voices and thus condemning truth as mere verifiable fact and stripping the pursuit of truth from its aspect of compassion and understanding of oneself and others.

Human Rights though indisputably universal today in our minds, have never constituted a fixed or even stable concept, accordingly, their pursuit and defense are not viable without a guiding principle of civility that overrides opinions for which we may or may not fall – they’re not one another aspect of faith in mankind such as the many lachrymose documentaries on murdered activists would like to make us think. This is not a conservative exhortation to abdicate the labor of human rights and the transmission of their very important message, rather it is a reflection about the fact that in today’s world more than ever, being a conscious reader and hearer of the news does not immediately empower us with holier-than-thou vests and battle shields to fight against violence and oppression without concise reflection on the information we receive and why. Human Rights activism is not a contest about who is more passionate than whom and therefore has the largest number of friends in social media and interviews with radio stations in far away countries. Being a citizen journalist and a human rights activist are very different occupations, because a defender of human rights is a full time job from which there are no possible bank holidays and it is also a process of intervention which is never neutral, for evil can never be condoned but that places well-being, safety, security, peace and legality over opinions of himself or others. It is all too very easy to tweet from the comfort of the living room sights and sounds of war, but more difficult is to develop a sense of empathy that is not a mindless addiction to mere images of violence and death without deference to the people behind them. Remember: “We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others[5]”.

[1] Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, pp 17, Picador, 2003

[2] Ibid, pp 19

[3] Hannah Arendt, “Notebooks”, November 1952, 5

[4] Susan Sontag, ibid, pp 18

[5] Francois de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 116

The Book of the Heathen (in process)

What is the fascination, and dread, of Judaism with Christianity? Though the question has little troubled the Jews, forever anchored in the rather painful and often deadly reality of the Christian history in which they have participated, the question terrorized the Christian, common believer and saint alike, through the ages, like an Ocean of hesitations that surfaced more like supplications at the shrine of an unknown and well-masked deity. The path trodden by those whose faith has been safely insured in the sword of Moses' law, seems rather obscure and bizarre either in the case they mean to uphold this law or to destroy it, replace it, improve it, dispel it, and the like; the equation or formulas implicit in the relationship are far less than important than the crude fact of the relationship as such. People would be little surprised if told that these are ancient times no more, and that the discussion over the nature of religion has moved away from the soteriological cycles of anxiety far more rooted in geography and anatomy than in the argumentative absolutes of science, not necessarily Cartesian science but not altogether too distant, for it is the logical argument over the nature of religion - just like one discusses the nature of stones, the origin of water and the physical chemistry of the universe, what distinguishes that brand of modern knowledge known as "the religion of reason", a form of religion contained within another form thereof. This particular mode of argumentation, that pays extreme and careful attention to detail in the most sophisticated scholarly fashion, known as "the critique of religion" is ultimately more scientific in the contemporary cats-and-mice sense of "catch the fallacy" than any venture endeavored by the science that supposedly brought to life such principles; this is only because the questions of science - and where it topologically coincides with classical theology - ultimately are aimed at the discovery of the "stuff life is made of", and in working out the principles behind it all, cannot pay enough attention to detail without the "last things", here meant otherwise than in the timely meditations of the saints: hereby the last things are nothing but the first things, how life began at all. The enterprise is less inimical to a comprehensive world view than it is the case with the critique of religion that is ever so pretending that one can chemically separate the constitutive elements of an scrambled egg into carefully labelled atomic and sub-atomic particles inside petri boxes and yet keep the scrambled egg intact with a self-serving pride of contemplation.

That "the stuff life is made of" is the one and only pretense of science and theology is no surprise, until the men of faith ultimately advance the beheading of God with the help of hyper-Christian heresies whilst science continues unmolested in the pursuit of "that stuff life is made of". The pre-modern overlap between scientific and theological forms of story-telling was less obvious than natural, at a time when the word "life" had not been trivialized to the extent of becoming a scientific premise for every form of early modern fringe science - sociology, anthropology, ethnology, philosophy of history - so that a certain philosopher was not entirely mistaken when he said that the philosophy of life was a tautology as embedded in fantasy as the botany of plants. Descartes and Leibniz had been both deeply pious and it was said of Newton that it was strange how the greatest theologian of the 17th century had found time to write about science; the piety here is not meant as a compliment but rather as circumstantial evidence in a secular trial against the philosophers and the theologians that expropriated the domain of science from rather harmless critical observations in order to apply them forcefully to a science of life that shattered to pieces "the stuff life is made of" with "scientific precision" and argued in the name of science that the "science of life" had been found at the same time that they delved deeper and deeper into the fringe science of rational thought - a system of absolute values that kept all the particular details and believed in infinitude whilst recollecting finite pieces thereof.

Thus Descartes turned out to be more of a Biblical man than the simplest science teacher in a school far inside the provinces - irrespective of the confession, even at the expense of having subverted the order of reality that circumscribed his piety in an earthly existence. Descartes, together with Pascal and Wolff, concerned himself about the relationship of Christian life (that is, dogmatic theology) with Biblical teaching (that is, with the Hebrew and Northwest-Semitic background of Holy Scripture). Because the history of the Jewish people (by both self-imagined and critical versions thereof) was spared the conflict between "the stuff life is made of" and the "sciences of life", no critical versions of Judaism or of any system of beliefs emerged until modern times, as everything from literature to history to science was filed under the same rubric: Holy Scripture. However the critique of religion was subjected in modern times to a religious critique of the critique of religion just like the critique of reason was subject to a rational critique of the critique of reason, the vicious disease of the Renaissance and Enlightenment: insofar as every principle is due to be "critiqued", the principles of the critique and thus the whole apparatus of truth is subject to any possible critical critique of principle. The result of this is that those encroached in the supreme worship of methodological truth ultimately accept the failure of all truth to deliver any promises at all and yet proceed to build a systematic science of life thereupon. The careful cross-examination derived from this process resulted in a growing interest in the "Origins", a favorite abstract referential in the "philosophy of life" which helplessly it tried to derive from its own principles slowly boiling down to a masterful blend of biology and fairy tale; but whenever the "Origin" as a referential category for surveying the nature of religion comes up, the modern scholar (no longer fluent in the medieval quadrivium, but within its more circumscribed specialism, a mixture of part-time tinman and self-taught alchemist) had to pay attention to a vision of himself and the other that want back further than the ideal of equality and humanity that unfathomably coincided with the golden age of discoveries of ancient cultures known as "Oriental Studies" that shed even more unfathomable information on the childish world of the Hebrew Bible that critical studies until then, now seen as paradoxically primitive, rejected as folk tales. There occurred a resurrection of manuscripts and treaties of Christian apologetics, pamphlets, obscure mystical commentaries and personal correspondence from very fine men of letters that dealt with the troubled relationship between Christians and Jews; the interest in this parental and fraternal relationship that today would have troubled any social welfare agency, wouldn't have grown to its current dimension of reversing the order of the critique of religion, weren't it for the fact that it matched with surgical precision the timing of the decline in organized religion that surprisingly came hand in hand with an unprecedented wave of institutional, criminal and intellectual antisemitism that was no longer confined to the pulpit of the churches on a beautiful Sunday morning but had reached the desk of government officials and very reputable writers from Monday through Friday as well - It seemed as if the Death-of-God theology in progress (with all due respect to Harvey Cox and Gabriel Vahanian who had something else completely in mind as they toyed with the concept with more American naive than apocalyptic seduction) included also in its road-map the death of the Jews.

While the extant Christian literature on Jews that spanned all the way from the late ancient world through yesterday's newspaper was more than abundant and by no means all antisemitic in the modern sense - medieval literature provided a vast array of dialogical literature, fiction and chronic, of exchanges between learned Jews, Christians and Muslims - the discovery of Judaism as a fertile field of theological and scientific study (and here we are not dealing with the professors of Hebrew and Jewish controversies in European universities since the Middle Ages that did nothing but giving a substantiated claim and face to popular antisemitism and were more often than not political appointments) revealed extra and post-Biblical sources for the study of Christianity; the realities of antisemitism

All

It has been so long since not a single word had been written, perhaps with a certain sense of attrition, sometimes writing and the broader context of intellectual exercises is constituted into a risky venture into the darkest bottom of fear than it is an exercise in freedom. There's just so much that we wouldn't like to acknowledge that we know in full, and a practice as public as that of writing and debating isn't particularly helpful in enhancing our self-confidence about not knowing, and the matter turns slightly more complicated at the prospect of this knowledge not concerning facts of science as much as the interpretation of what one could not without a certain pressumption, call but an interpretation of basic truths of the world. One is always inclined to think that writing is so much more entertaining than actual learning and that the practice of meaning and expression is far more valuable than that of scientific learning. There exists undoubtedly an acute chasm between science and dream, between scholarship and flight.

The flight is the ALL and yet nothing, whereas scholarship is nothing and yet the ALL. We know the reluctance with which philosophy and science, infested with a certain theological caution, handle the ALL. The world in the old metaphysical systems was construed, brick by brick, from the pressumption of the ALL, however there's no such a thing as one brick or another when the ALL is the underlying pressumption.

Fragment

"...Ma poi allimprovviso sento i tuoi gesti nei miei, ti riconosco nelle mie parole. Tutti colore che se ne vanno, ti lasciano sempre addosso un po di se? E questo il segreto della memoria? Se e cosi, allora, mi sento piu sicura perche so che non saro mai sola..."

I thought suddenly about Lorenzo, about all the faces that vanished one day and receded into something that I'm yet unable to describe, sometimes a line comes up, in a journal or in something that you believe comes out of the purest imagination but that then suddenly you realize, you had learnt somewhere, about the colours and the gestures, that no matter how hard you try, are never leaving you. There's something both helpless and innocent about this, and then when suddenly, you recognize it, the recognition doesn't come from the past but rather from somewhere even deeper down, the transformation of the smell that once intoxicated you, of the hand once earthbound fleeing toward the river, escaping from the ill sensation of the empty bank, of the blank page, of the fear of an old age. How many Lorenzos are there in the world? Perhaps a moment too early, an hour too late, impossible altogether and hence powerless, embedded in a nest of dead flowers, with a soft breeze leaking abovewards and causing it to rain contrariwise, onto the carpeted floors of the vacuum from which our lives hang down serendipitously but yet in the immensity of a certain silence, interrupted only by those pieces of dead matter that, just like in the physics of particles, only when put together, come alive and overpower you at the moment when you've just forgotten the source of the power itself, as if the memory itself would be to no more avail than a postcard hand-written with blank letters.

All the more, however, my anxiety increases and especially at night, my fear of death grows immensely; in each mosquito bite I begin to detect what could be the beginning of a lethal disease, feeling the mortal pulsation growing and ascending from my toes into the dryness of the lower lip and the tremor in the hand. Perhaps the feeling is not altogether real any more than the confirmation of life contained within, that melody of mighty waters slowly overturning the sky and turning it into a waterfall running the opposite direction of the ocean, at standstill, but yet in spite of the immensity, so fragile that it seems as if it is going to break anytime and dissolve into nothingness, and yet it doesn't; the surface of everything, the tissue and the texture, of life even, remains stretched and shaking, but yet it cannot be cut into pieces lest the whole world disappear with the vessels of truth in it and the ponds of lies around it. The eyes become acquiescent before the delicate lines of the light and unfold into later hours, such small hours! So small that nothing is left but yourself without them afterwards, bruised and frightened, but all the more undead. The limbs are still intact and they reach out for the warmth of the blood beneath bruises and scars, foreign to the sterile perfection of peace, of deceased time, preferring the transcription of a symphony over the free fall and loss found in the formlessness of the litany - the words are undistinguishable from the sounds of the worlds, madness ensues.

"Morgenland"

To Sevgi, Katherina and Ivan...

"If the world was only one country, Istanbul would be its capital"

Cured slabs of fatback or pork belly, that is what we used to eat at the monastery in the beginning of that last winter, not unusually colder but somewhat more transparent, as if made out of glass rather than water and rain. The friar would haunt the markets at the earliest hour after the sunset, hunting for the precious cured skins that used to be wrapped in old paper and hung for a few days at the basement, as a purification ritual of sorts, probably learnt from the Cossacks in the steppes of the Caucasus and brought to the Orient by the Christian travellers that settled there hundreds of years before our own time. Finding the skins at the market was also something for which much precaution was needed because in the Orient, anything can ignite the fire of a war, not only the worship of one God or another but also something simpler like the skin of an animal not thought as pure in the Scripture, in a stall at the market. God, he only watched silently, as the laws of men, argued each other, with a finger up, but also with a sword.

One might think that it would be possible at first sight to find the cured skins of the pig at the large open markets in Mahane Yehuda, in between Jaffa Road - Jerusalem's main road and the favourite scenario of prayers, revolutions and bombings, built in 1861 under the Ottoman Empire and that made it possible for Jerusalem to flourish outside the walls of the Old City, and some neighbourhoods that still exist today, the Russian Compound, Nahalat Shiva, Mahane Yehuda; at the time the traffic consisted originally of mules and camels but the road was eventually improved enough to allow for carriages drawn by horses. The German Templars, who were established there (and founded the German colony, their cemetery, along the Emek Rephaim Road, still stands there) began the first regular carriage service along the new Jaffa Road -, and Agripas Street, that surrounded the Bohemian quarters of Nachlaot and named in honor of Agrippa I, "King of the Jews" - a grandson of Herod the Great and son of Aristobulus IV; Agrippa was depicted by the New Testament as a cruel and heartless king that persecuted the Jerusalem church - "...Now about that time Herod the king laid hands on some of the church in order to mistreat them. And he did away with James, the brother of John, with the sword..." (Acts 12:1-2).

Then it seems, that Jerusalem, has always been under the spell of one or another sword. "...Now he was furious with the Tyrians and the Sidonians. And they came to him with one accord; and having persuaded Blastus, the king's chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country was fed from the king's country. And on an appointed day Herod arrayed himself in royal clothing and sat on the judgment seat; and he delivered a public address to them. And the populace cried out, The voice of a God and not of a man! And instantly an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give the glory to God; and he was eaten by worms and expired..." (Acts 12:20-23). The Jews however, including the historian Josephus, had thought differently of Agrippa, who governed in Judea to the satisfaction of the Jews and who expressed a zeal for Judaism in private and in public.

The Mishna itself reads, in tractate Sotah 7:8 (the tractate dealing with the laws relating to the woman suspected of adultery) "...What was the procedure in connection with the portion (of the Torah) read by a King? At the conclusion of the first day of the festival of the Tabernacles in the eighth, i.e., the end of the seventh, they erect a wooden dais in the temple court, upon which, he sits; as it is said, at the end of every seven years, in the set time, etc. The synagogue-attendant takes a Torah scroll and hands it to the synagogue-president, and the synagogue-president hands it to the high priest deputy. He hands it to the king. The king stands and receives it, but reads sitting. King Agrippa stood and received it and read standing, for which act the sages praised him. When he reached, thou mayesy not put a foreigner over thee, his eyes ran with tears. They said to him, "Fear nor, Agrippa, thou are our brother!" The king reads from the beginning of Deuteronomy up to the "Shema", the Shema, and it shall come to pass if ye hearken, thou shalt surely tithe, when thou hast made an end of tithing, the portion of the king, and the blessings and curses, until he finishes all the section. The king pronounces the same benedictions as the high priest, except that he substitutes one for the festivals instead of one for the pardon of sin...".

But it was not along the street of righteous King Agrippa where the skins would be found by the friars, and anyway there was no point in looking for anyone there, for it is said that Agrippa was no longer there, it had been said already in the Book of Acts that he had died eaten by worms, what might have been possibly Fournier's gangrene, the same disease that had killed his grandfather Herod the Great. At the market in Mahane Yehuda, the most strict dietary laws as prescribed by the rabbis were kept with zeal, and every day of the week, but particularly on Friday morning, it was possible to see herds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in all possible versions of black and grey shopping for the Holy Sabbath; "challes", the sweet and salty bread in the form of the braids of a maiden, all freshly baked, "beygelach" and "rugelach", simple pastries imported from the bitter cold of Eastern Europe, but magically turned into suculent delicious exotic delicacies from far away lands at the hands of the experienced and volatile-tempered bakers of Jerusalem; trays of chickens properly slaughtered according to the ancient ritual - livers, breasts, legs, wings, everything spotlessly clean from the inside and the outside, ready to jump into the caldron that boils for hours the traditional chicken soup that the Jews are also known for using to cure not only a bad cold but also the after effect of drunkenness after a Tisch - a night in which an Admor, the Rebbe of a Chassidic clan hosts a meal during which the soul is flooded with singing and dancing, sharing some pieces of food, most often potato kugel or simple cakes, while the bottles of vodka and prune liquor pass from hand to hand back and forth in between the ecstasic audience.

The market is also carpeted all along by rows of pickled herring, beets, peas and beans in manifold textures staring into the passers from a glass jar, waiting to be finally raptured by a hand, perhaps parfumed with garlic and thyme, that together with mint and rosemary and hibiscus and basil dance freely atop a shopping basket and gleefully blink an eye to the unknowing tourists and at last long then also the most colourful fruits coming directly from the Galilee and from the small green settlements along the Judean desert and southwards almost peeping into Egypt and Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Mount Sinai desert, whose real name is "The Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai", known for possessing some of the world's oldest painted icons and being in itself perhaps the second oldest working Christian monastery in the world, consecrated as a place of pilgrimage after the remnants of Catherine of Alexandria, a Christian martyr, were purported to have been transported there by the angels and found by the monks. In times of Muhammed, a Fatimid mosque was built inside the monastery walls but was never used because it seems to not have been correctly oriented towards Mecca, which happened at a time during which the monastery was empty after the isolated Christian anchorites of Sinai were murdered in the 7th century although ever since the First Crusade that reached Sinai in 1270, the monastery has been occupied by European Christians and is now under the autonomous control of the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.

Our monastery, so small and modest, without any of the grandeur of Catherine of Alexandria, well-sited in a street named after a great modern rabbi, stood not far away from the Street of the Prophets along which one or another Chassidic Tisch might be found in more than one place, every Friday of the year at night, with the only exception of the rare cases in which the Day of the Atonement, the holiest in the Hebrew calendar after the Sabbath, falls on a Friday, the worlds that separated the Franciscan house of St. Simeon and Anna and the Chassidic palaces, loomed larger than twice the distance of the Equator, and I dare call them palaces because I was once invited for lunch of the Sabbath morning to the house of a stranger, in a Chassidic neighbourhood, that seemed not particularly beautiful or pleasing from the outside - it resembled more one of those large apartment blocks in which immigrants are crowded outside European capitals more than the beautiful Mediterranean houses whose balconies are full living rooms protruding with flowers, ashtrays, old chairs and fresh newspapers, but I was instead welcome in the inside by this old Jewish family from Vienna, that had brought along with them, into the scorching sun of the Orient, the dead elegance of the Imperial city, back from the times when the Romans founded the settlement of Vindobona on the banks on the Danube, in the year 15 BC, as a fortified city to guard the empire against the Germanic tribes from the north.

It was really so, that one might have the idea that nothing had changed since then and had been transported to Jerusalem without further ado, the ivory floors that resembled ancient palaces and the artful cornices of plaster that timidly imitated some of the eternity of Doric and Ionian capitals within the houses of the old nobility; then there were the elegant glass lamps hanging down from the imperial ceilings like a shy drizzle of crystal, so that one might have been then at the same time in one of those sumptuous classrooms at the Mozarteum that were at the same time libraries, music halls and galleries, what might have been also said of the old Talmudic academies in Vilnius and Riga, or closer to Vienna even, in Brisk and Slobodka, Novardok and Ponevech, all of which were destroyed in between the wars and some of which later were re-opened in rather shabby buildings in Jerusalem and Bnei Barak, with nothing else but the old spiritual grandeur; once I took a class at Slobodka with an American young "talmid chochom" (student of wisdom, the Hebrew term for a very devoted student of the Law), it was the first time I opened a tractate of Talmud, on a winter night, many summers ago; if I still remember correctly, it was the twenty-something page of tractate Bava Kamma, dealing with damages and torts, it might have been something about a fire extending into the property of a third person or something about a vessel that broke, I can't quite remember exactly.

But anyway, that's how my idea of the palace conjured up, something between the Mozarteum and the yeshiva. There was something about the beautiful spotless red almost turned purple wig of the lady in the house, and about the moustache and fur hat -both of them carefully trimmed, of her son, the young Rabbi, about the portrait frames with the ageing black and white pictures on the sideboard and about the stunning China, adorned with lines of gold, something so perfectly clean and aesthetic that it already borders on melancholy and on the temptation of death. This something, with the smell of a Viennese dialect, all too recognizable not so much from the words as from the gestures of the hand and the shoulder, would infinitely contrast with the words of Torah spoken at the table, with the fresh air of the city, with the immortal breeze, with the kindness of these men. Almost across the street from their oasis of Roman eternity, lied the entrance to the markets inside the Old City, which had survived all of Jerusalem's suicide attempts, either through the Jaffa Gate or Damascus Gate, you would find yourself quickly after the churches, the Stations of the Cross, the German and Austrian hospices and some old Templar pilgrimage guest houses (now used for expensive clerical soirees and for accomodating the emissaries of the Kingdom of God while travelling through the Holy Land), inside the Arab market, where the Muslims and the Christians would amalgamate into one single bundle of stalls, colours and smells; baklavas and frankincense, souvenirs and chickpeas, keffyiehs and groceries imported from the Gulf countries.

But there inside the darkest passages, as if in the lost pieces of a mystery in the scriptures, written in extinct and forgotten languages, the friars could run all their shopping errands unmolested, unlike in Mahane Yehuda or the shops in the Armenian quarter, coming out of the Jewish neighbourhoods where they would be often spat on by the small children of the religious families. In some of these passages, above of which water leaked from the age-old stone concave ceilings, the trays of fish would look up into the whole bodies of calves and pigs hanging from a sharp hook, out of which the skin would be ripped with knives and placed again atop larger trays bedded with thawing ice. The felicitious sale of pork meat would immediately signal the ownership of the meatshop by a Christian or by an infidel Muslim, in an all too impopular business transaction. At least here, the status quo of the theological mischief would be maintained at the expense of threatening eyes and imprecations, rather than having the places burnt down as it had been the cases in many Jewish settlements, like in the mystical town of Safed, where the shop and the house of a Russian woman who had converted to Christianity, had been torched by zealous Chassidim. I heard there were other markets too, in Kurdish and Georgian neighbourhoods, where I had never been and whose language I didn't understand, but I did know full well that the slabs of fatback were to be found at least in those Christian meatshops at the Arab market.

Friar Ivan would bring the slabs to the monastery for preparing large supplies of "Salo", a typical Ukrainian food, that consisted of curing the slabs with salt and aged in a cold place, so that it would last for a year or more, adding thick layers of minced garlic, black pepper and a yellow paprika that in my ignorance, reminded me of an ochre-colored curry imported from Iraq that was often added to the meat slices roasting on the rotisserie, though it was not common, I had tried it before to much distaste at a famous shwarma stand along Jabotinsky Road, when I had lived in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, in a small place called Ramat Gan. As in the traditional way, we used to thin-slice the salo and eat it on rye-bread to accompany small glasses of vodka or sometimes the traditional Ukrainian horilka, a strong liquor made from distelling grain, potatoes and beets; although more often I would prefer the so-called "perzivka", which is nothing but horilka with chilli peppers. When Father Apolinare, the Polish priest and dean of the monastery would be on leave, we would invite in Sergei and Vlado, two friar friends from Russia and Croatia, who lived at the time in another monastery inside the walls of the Old City, where Ivan and me had been some years before. On the rest of the days when some silence and discipline was required in the house, we would go by with a few classes of red wine from Mount Tabor, that was made also by Christian monks and shipped to all the monasteries all over the country for everyday use.

I don't remember exactly how I ended up living in a monastery, being as godless as I had always been, but those days I remember with a certain glee of happiness; rising early in the morning to scrub the floors and tidy the small TV room, enjoying the breakfast prepared sometimes by Rimona, the house keeper, and other times, by ourselves; spending the day in the small library next to the chapel and oftentimes going into the city, hauntings the cafes and the thrills of people, only a few streets away from home. Oftentimes too we would stay for the Holy Mass and would prepare the chapel during the afternoon hours, tidying up everything, bringing each day fresh linen cloth for the altar and preparing everything so that sacraments could be delivered at the hour. For so long, I had been so not in control of my life and depended almost exclusively on the charity of other people, particularly on Christian charity because my soul was already too tired to pray to the Jewish God and I spent most of my hours walking through the Christian churches in the East, trying to find shelter from life in the renunciation of a contemplative stance for which I never had any loyalty whatsoever, being in such constant urgency to become one with the edges of risk. Not for one moment I thought of myself as a Christian, but I did feel constantly that whatever had held any power to subject me to the Law, had lost all its validity in the course of universal history, that there could be no solace, no relief, no atonement.

And I remember the monastery because it was there that I heard about Istanbul for the first time; on a certain afternoon of salo and horilka, I had heard together with Ivan a story told in Italian about a certain Roman lady, who had divorced a man and then fled to Istanbul, having felt at the moment of her arrival that so much had been wasted in her life, so much time, only in order to come at long last to the capital of the world, that has had more names in the past than religions in the present, and once in the city she had been the lover of a famous poet and the muse of many others, then later in life she bought a Hamam, a Turkish bath, and re-did it all by herself opening again to the public at a time when the Hamam was no longer fashionable, becoming an institution in itself with people coming from everywhere just to get a glimpse of Madam Anita, who was as eccentric as she was a mysterious character. After many years of illness, the Hamam closed down when Madam could no longer run the place, even though the stories were still heard from one end to another of the Bosphorous, and when she ultimately died, the Hamam was inherited by her nephew Francesco, a Roman architect trapped in a very simple little life of banality and pleasure.

Francesco then travels for the first time to Istanbul to try and sell the property quickly and return to run his business in Rome but after having experienced for the first time not only the secrets of the Hamam but also the sense of urgency and life that comes to all of those who come to Istanbul for the first time. He decides not to sell the Hamam and to invest in the difficult work of opening the Hamam again, developing a very close friendship with the Turkish family that took care of Madam during the long years of her exile in Istanbul (or it is true that perhaps she had been exiled in Rome and then free in Istanbul...) and a passionate Romance with Mehmet, the young son of the family. In the meanwhile his wife Martha in Rome, is known to have had a long Romantic affair with Paolo, their business associate and flies to Istanbul in order to get divorced from Francesco who is apparently set on his mind to stay behind the Hamam. To Martha's dismay, she encountered a totally different Francesco and realized how she was still in love with him until she discovered one night at the Hamam, the dreamland of love that flourished between Francesco and Mehmet. Eventually at the engagement party of Mehmet's sister, Fusun, she storms up the moment with an open confession of her infidelity and in the end of that tragic night, Francesco signs the papers for the divorce and Martha leaves for a hotel in the city in order to fly back to Rome the next day.

As the next day approaches, both Martha and Francesco are freed from each other and Martha sits on a cafe to read the letters that Madam had written and never sent to her sister, Francesco's mother, then she goes on to visit a friend of Madam Anita trying to find answers for herself in all what has happened, or perhaps not answers, but to enable herself to ask the right questions - An affair with Paolo, leaving Francesco, loving Francesco again, his turbulent love for Mehmet, and while she's visiting this old Italian man who like Anita, had exiled himself forever in the beautiful turned upside down skies of Istanbul, and while there, she learns that Francesco has been murdered by a gunman that the Turkish mafia that had wanted to buy his property had summoned, because they had wanted to turn the whole neighbourhood into a modern commercial complex and the refusal of Francesco to comply with the sales, had put the project to halt. That story I had heard during my last weeks at the monastery, as Ivan and I listened to attentively trying not to miss one single detail, even though we were still occupied with the chores of the house and the tasks given to us by the Kingdom of God on earth, but the story I never forgot.

Later that year when I had abandoned the monastery and also the city of Jerusalem, being too drunk on wine to cry at all, I received a letter from the painter Katherina, a belovedmost friend from another life, in an ancestral city of stone, a person different in every way from Catherina of Alexandria, even though they had both been in Istanbul, which is where Katherina's letter had been sent from. Since at the time I didn't have any stories to tell myself, or at least I thought I didn't - it is impossible not to be disciplined as an storyteller! I remember very well the letter, that also contained some train tickets and a box of Turkish cigarettes that traveled with me all the way to another continent, it was a letter about a journey, in which the painter had met a Turkish writer exiled in Switzerland and writing theatre in the German language; they had spent a beautiful night at a bar, which later I learnt, must be somewhere in the Taksim quarter, around the French street which now for political reasons has been renamed Algeria Street, or so I heard from Faruk, a Kurdish friend who still awaits for me somewhere around there and who has lived for over ten years in Istanbul waiting for a friend to arrive. Katherina had spent a beautiful night of truth and wonder with her Turkish friend, whose name I never learnt, after which they had agreed to meet at the airport before their flights back to Europe but out of some deceitful trick of the times, Katherina had been late and missed the writer for one a few moments, so that she had already crossed the gate that divided the world of those merely waiting from the world of those already departing.

She could only glimpse into her long beautiful hair and the motions of her shoulders, and was left there, in the other side, with this deep sense of abandonment, of having been stolen out of a crucial moment of life, glancing into a friend, into a network of moments of life, now lost forever and only a few meters ahead, yet already infinitely distant. Katherina made pictures of her through the glass but the airport security made her delete all the pictures and so she was left there, with nothing but a moment, a moment lost that could irreparably change the course of the hours and the years. I have felt this so many times, like that day when I was invited by a stranger to a party given in honor of a young writer I had never met, and in whose hands and eyes I encountered a certain fondness that has never abandoned me, whom I had described in my own writing as an "airport love", even though I saw him one next time, sitting in his room and staring into the Andean mountains, having one Last Supper, knowing full well that I should have met this person so many years before in life, and living with the burdensome awareness that it's now lost, for the day after our fateful encounter he was already on a plane that took him to the Siberian esteep, living next to a lake in a beautiful but shabby house, with students from Iran and Uzbekistan, not speaking one word of the language, writing me a poem, sometimes a shot letter that I never responded to, trying to ameliorate my sense of loss.

There was also a young man with a Biblical name, that I met during a journey, and who himself was a wayfarer exiled in a distant foreign land, a young man whose fullness of embodiment on earth I loved since the very first minute I encountered him, and who had told me once, in a letter, some weeks before I met his beautiful countenance, that one day we should meet at the local airport with a bottle of spirits and just sit around somewhere, looking into people, into coming, into going, trying to pierce through the leaks in the possible lost time. However, after one night of despair, when I had no choice but to show him my pain, my colourful and transient sorrow, he shun me off from his sight forever and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come visit the shore of the palm of his hand ever again, no matter how much I had loved the space in which he existed, the words that he offered me and the fresh water of his fingertips. The day he was supposed to leave, I turned up at the airport with the long-promised bottle of spirits, trying to catch a glimpse of him, a last souvenir, something, anything, an image, a number on a napkin, a smell around the neck, and no matter how many hours, how many hours I wandered about, inspecting each and every face, every and every fingertip, each lover in a lonely table, every word of silent conversation between one traveler and another, I was left without the simplest tangible memory of having ever wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders, it could have been a lie, I could have imagined it all, there's absolutely no way I can prove it. That's why Katherina's letter has stayed fixed in my mind like a cross, even though on the first night of a certain journey, I was assaulted in the street and my handbag was lost with her letter and also with a small drawing of a garden we had both seen, that she had sent me with a friend from Vienna all the way to the fresh breezes of Tel Aviv. My sense of loss is so enormous, that I just can't let go of it.

In a letter I wrote once to Jonathan, the man with the Biblical name, the man that vanished as swiftly as he had become an epiphany before, I explained it to the best of my knowledge, without knowing full well how important that best knowledge would become only shortly thereafter: "It is like the metaphor of loving someone at the airport, through the window panes that separate the different waiting rooms; imagining scenes of suffering from one to the next station of the Cross, out of the simplest glass of whiskey held by the hand, out of the watch missing from the wrist or the ring from the finger, thinking that maybe it was stolen by a lover or asked to be turned in after a sentimental disaster. This is a rather voyeuristic price to pay, that of the artist or the writer, the infinitely aesthetic pleasure of experiencing love and desire from the vantage point of the most absolute and impossible distance, there is no pity and no mercy in this loving contemplationm it is riddled by the most objective form of cruelty. The unwillingness to interfere in the slow lane of biological processes, avoiding the nearness of the lips with the only intention to avoid not a bad aftertaste but with the firm resolution to supress and surpass all guilt. Guilt must be supressed insofar as it is rememeberable."

And so I remembered always this letter from Istanbul, without going into the particular details of architectural importance, because it was to me more of a cycle of legends that had begun with Catherina of Alexandria, passing through the most intangible losses and winding up into the real Katherina, the evening painter, about fifteen centuries later. I never thought that I would see Istanbul again until that morning when out of my desperate need for conversation I went up the very steep hill into that balcony from which one could see a beautiful city far away in the distance, and though that city was not Istanbul, the balcony itself contained the city, with the stories of loss, spanning from the Christian martyr to the godless painter, and it was not because the balcony resembled the city in anyway but only because she, my muse, Sevgi, contained all the eyes of the city into her own two eyes - no more space was needed. That early morning, as we sat in the sun and devoured all the possibilities afforded by the language of human beings, I picked back the thread left somewhere in a boat along the Bosphorous those many years ago and retrieved its full power with the conviction that never again would I let go of such power to entice. It was as if a whole life could be crowded into one single day of happiness without losing one single moment, without losing one single moment of fidelity with the past and with the present. Any person who would have seen Sevgi that morning would make sure to think that she's perhaps the most beautiful of all women, or rather, the most beautiful female, the endless recognition of the instinct of life, the edges and the risk and the breeze and the oxygen and the air and the absence of the air, everything in one single creature.

I had been completely uncertain the night before whether I should in fact ascend that mountain in order to come to her like a prince is coming to the rescue of a maiden, and whether I had been truly asked to come to Istanbul in the middle of the sunny breeze of a deserted January; and it wasn't because I had no trust in the power that the words of truth have to give people power to move freely in the world and of their own accord, but it had to do with the endless sense of loss that I had grown into for a long time now in which the only firm resolution ever made possible to fight against the triviliaties of life and the lies of dead time was the solitude of the philosopher in his writing desk, having lost, along the biffurcating paths of the journey, all possible skills for living, having renounced the world even in spite of the consistent knowledge that there could be no better world than this, no better life than this, but for the others, as pieces in a puzzle, as characters in a novel, but yet nothing that could touch you so immediately and unmediatedly that you would lose yourself in somebody else only in order to find the clarity to offer a single moment of uninterested love. All my conversations were solitary, sollipsistic even, poorly poetical and though very loyal to myself, they were also in the highest level of inflicted self-damage. But when I arrived in Istanbul, looking into the foreign city, that though beautiful, resembled more a post card than a reality I had any wish to live in, because the beauty was not made out of the pressure of time against our chest but rather out of completely dead matter; bricks, banks, concrete, glass, crystal, metal, but not one single word, not one single story, not the slightest clue of what it means to build a world together; so Istanbul yes, upon my arrival, I was welcome with the freshest light that was ever casted on an eye human, and for several hours I couldn't let go of the feeling that I was dying or that I was going to die.

I don't want to be misunderstood, this is not because I felt unhappy, but rather because never before, since I had lived once so fully and so intensely, it hadn't been possible to feel so many things at once, and so overwhelmed I was that every second I went through the most unbearable fear that the moments that bound together the seconds and the minutes and the hours would come to an end; I inspected my body carefully, inspected it searching for blotches in the skin or for any possibly lethal bleeding or mortal wounds, because that would explain the terrible unease caused by the recognition of being yet so far away, the Angst and the fear, the fear of yet losing her once again, like Katherina's friend was lost at the airport, like I lost the writer and Jonathan as well, like Catherine of Alexandria lost her body atop Mount Sinai in the hands of the sand, I wasn't sure that I would be able to cope with this loss once I had reached Istanbul inside an Andean forest. Being at home is too strong an expression for someone who's declared himself a nomad in the world, even within the same city and for someone for whom direction is not an established guideline in life, but perhaps that is what it was, irrespective of the actual geography, being at home in the sense of having understood the same way that the other has understood and the fact of becoming completely electrified by this. I never thought this could happen to me unless I would go to Istanbul, but not counting with the miraculous deed that one day, in the most somber moment of my life, Istanbul would come to me, with praise and song, with faith and love. It was not death perhaps, what I fret with so much anguish about, but rather the fear of being alive again, a fear that is difficult to let go of, not because it makes you afraid but because you've fallen in love with the fear - for there's no courage without fear.

But as my boat landed on the Bosphorous that settled in between one glass and another, I made sure to throw my anchor so that I could never again be dispossessed, so that I wouldn't have to begin writing letters that I would ultimately never send insofar as they would have to be sent on this today and not in any other today, because otherwise I would be already forgotten and estranged. I began to daydream as I spoke at the same time, and the sun changed into rain, I saw the postcard city ahead of us disappear into nothingness and become replaced by the imagery of something that while it is not eternal, it couldn't be ransacked by fools. So many letters I wrote that day! I wrote with my hands in the air and with the smoke that came out of my mouth, with the movement of my legs and with the songs that I whispered to myself, with every pulsation of the heart and each blinking of the eye. I had traveled through so many places, some of them cruel and shameful, the countries of birth, far away from the spaces of desire, the intellectual mercilessness of reasoning about things that have to do with the human heart and with again, the sense of loss, while other places were beautiful and singular, pictoresque, possible, timely, and necessary. I wonder if I can ever lose Istanbul after having sunk so deep into the river that contained Sevgi's beauty with the sadness and the joy, the abandonment and the liveliness!

So different it looks now to be in Istanbul than I did when I lived in the monastery trying to take shelter from the failures of my life, which are no longer failures but loyal evidence to not having betrayed one's dreams as a child, of walking along untrodden paths that couldn't have been walked before, unless the visionary, without the self-confidence of the genius, would have cut through the haze of ivies without hesitation of expectation even. That day, at night, as Sevgi's millions of words resounded in my head over and over, haunting me not like nightmares but like the sudden and unexpected arrival of dreams of purest white beauty, in between the dizziness of the wine and the pasta, the intoxication of empathy, the inability to let go of the moment, my own surrender to the merciless passage of time, I thought that there was a part of the Hamam's story that I hadn't listened to carefully and I could do so only now after I had been back to the streets of Istanbul in the eyes of Sevgi and that I couldn't do with Ivan anymore because after his journey to Moscow he converted to Orthodox Judaism and is now called Yochanan rather than Ivan and is locked up in one of those Talmudic academies that I fled from when I entered the monastery: After the death of Francesco, Martha was taken in again by the Turkish family that had hosted Francesco, as she was heart-broken and unable to return to Rome, but eventually as it had been the case with Francesco, they became her own family and the purest realization of sense in life, so that she ended up staying in Istanbul and finishing the work of the Hamam that Francesco had begun, becoming in turn, herself, a new Madam Anita, forever anchored in the Bosphorous and running the Hamam by herself. This is the last letter that she sent to Mehmet:

"Dear Mehmet,

Yesterday we finally got a letter from you. I'm happy to hear you're doing fine. But if that's not true, if you want to talk, I am here. Since you left the neighbourhood has changed a lot. I convinced Fusun not to get married, to your mother's great joy, last week Yildiz had her baby and they've decided to call him Francesco, of course, Perran, Fusun and I had a good cry over the news. Almost every afternoon I go down to the Hamam, we're done with the work now. Sometimes at sunset I get sad, but then the cold breeze blows, all of a sudden, and takes my sadness far away. It's a strange breeze, like no other. It's a light breeze, and it loves me".

Monday

Two important kinds of headaches: Always in the morning, because of not having slept or because of sleeping in too late.

There's compulsion of writing, as if there were no other way in which I could keep myself going; I've been to the morning, so sunny and fresh, absolutely beautiful and paced, but I am living out of different materials which are not necessarily different in the temporal sense; syncopated daydreaming that extends into realms beyond that of the simple task of writing. The world seems to be run with extreme paucity of mind, so slow that I can no longer keep track of the changes because of my impatience - in the books, everything works a little faster, a variety of temporal indexes blend in, dreams and letters, things I had wanted to say and things I had never wanted to talk about. Never before had I waited for the mornings with such sense of disfiguration, enjoying if only for very brief moments the gifts of early life, not wanting to miss one single moment. The writing becomes a compulsion not only because I ignore how could I possibly live hadn't I done this, but also because the limits of the format seem stretched into other fields that require dead things in order to come to life, such as art and music. I would like to be read in so many possible ways, to leave the reader undone and completely disturbed, stealing his peace of mind, a very slow form of poisoning that walks around in circles through the eyelids and remains ever so awake even through the slumber of the hours.

Earthly life, that moment of life, how much she loved walking in the city, much better than in the country, rejoicing in artifacts, trying not to decay into dust, one single sentence for the whole day, the untimely meditation of the rush, who would have thought there could be a story to be told? I inspect favourite writers and others less beloved, not trying to compare experiences as such but more like lifting up the achievements of the language to such a level in which it becomes completely incomprehensible - not incomprehensible in the level of scientific formulae, but in a reckless excess of recognition, drowning the names and the things in the world beneath a think surface of ink, so that one reader, far away, should be trying to save his life, not in order not to die, but with the sole intention of safeguarding his own body from falling into the abyss of ordinary things. How ordinary could they be after all? There's nothing really spectacular about this, except for the insertion of time into the inert life of earthly things, as if everything were dying at the same time, consumed at the same time that the flesh is ripped from the bones and thrown at the request of the bearer into a vault of inertia.

Dead Things

"About writing and my non-communication... Maybe it's a matter of Vienna, you simply forget to communicate. It is horror, in fact. You are so good in this, I like your communicativeness. I would love and enjoy even more to meet you for conversation - you are so brilliant in this, you have style, you are glamorous and deep, old and very young." -Letter from Katherina Olschbaur

6:00

Rising before 6:00 o'clock is the only suppresion of guilt that I know of, it is a mortal race, a rally in the desert if you want, because it means to start living, frantically and in a chain of chemical reactions, a few minutes before the sun. It does not matter whether you had gone to bed the previous night only a few hours before and that your sleep was not deep, but rather tireless daydreaming as if travelling across centuries and continents. Only a few minutes before 6:00, that would be enough, time to dress up rapidly and without further ado, but unlike other days when I dressed up as well, there was no particular reason to do that.

I wouldn't run any errands through the city, walking around markets and queueing before the desks of bureaucrats, nor would I sit in cafes waiting for unpunctual lovers and acquaintances while jotting down notes in an old notebook formerly used to failingly learn a foreign language. I only liked the idea of unwaiting, as if a lonely young woman would put on an elegant gown, earrings and parfum and then would prepare a large suitcase in order to wait for a man at the train station to take her home. It is not that the man weren't to arrive, but the only certainty she had is that she still didn't know him nor when would he arrive.

"Niet om er afschied te nemen,

of om mij op reis te begeven,

ben ik het station ingegaan,

maar om tussen de mensen te staan,

om ergens heen te gaan." -Ed Hoornik

[To the train station I went,

Not to begin a journey myself,

Or even to bid you farewell,

But to stand between all people,

Who are living for some goal,

For somewhere to go.]

Before I jotted down the list of what I endeavour to do "today", I stand for a moment in the patio standing by the roses and peppermint leaves surrounded by a fence of cement, looking into the sky and smoking one only cigarette, perhaps just trying to make sure to ruin the chemical balance of the day right before it started, as if sometimes murder would be the only possible degree of freedom granted to the inmates of a prison in a far-away island where they all had been sent on solitary confinement for the sole crime of immortality.

Then the list of my tasks for the day would be nothing like the heroic tasks performed by other people as they leave the house in order to jump fresh into life, board on a train and just like Herr Samsa, spend hours back and forth travelling in between clients and providers fulfilling with scientific precision the meticulous demands of "making something happen". Thus, I begin my list:

- Conquer the world

- Escape

- Love

- Not sleep one single minute through the day

- Get to the page 170 of a certain novel

- Feel a little less contempt for the city and the country

- Write a philosophical novel

- Try to understand the worst opera ever written

And yet the reason why I refused to sleep in one second more is because I am well aware that it might take years and centuries to achieve any of the above, perhaps with the excepcion of escape or love, which only takes one minute - to be at the wrong time in the wrong place; but reaching yet the 170th page of a novel might be a lot more difficult, because my usual habit of reading - that perhaps has to do with my laziness of heart and extreme inability to concentrate, is more similar to the paliative care offered to a dying man, than to actual entertainment, scholarship and acquisition of knowledge.

As a rule, regardless of the time of day and night in which I am reading, I take off my shoes and also my socks, perhaps even the sweater if it is not winter and crawl back to my cave under the silent stairway finding shelter under the blankets, not just one, but all of them, including the sheets and the duvet, carefully placing the worn-out pillow against the wall and just as carefully I place myself comfortably as if entering a coffin that one borrowed from a friend, who's perhaps already dead or rather, in denial of his mortal condition and finds no use for the comfortable artifact.

"There's no possible way one could learn anything reading like a dying person, under the blankets, while a bright sun outside is hammering with burning desire the icy patches of bare skin left unmolested by spectacles and trenchcoats", I whispered to myself yesterday afternoon and realized then how long it would take me to read a whole novel, so that perhaps it would be more effective to write one myself. It never occurred to me that since the most innocent youth, I had trained myself to read novels like a dying person would - always lying in a bed. As a matter of fact, people should learn how to read in libraries and cafes, in the company of other people, perhaps sitting across the TV set in the late afternoon or while trying to avoid the dearth of landscape during a bus ride.

Even the most suidical writers would read their own novels and those of other writers while sitting on a coach, perhaps in the middle of smoking, for who could commit suicide in the middle of smoking a cigarette? That was at least the natural logic of a certain novel in which a young woman had jumped to her death from the balcony of her hotel room yet in the middle of smoking a cigarette, Mary McCarthy I think it was who wrote it, but then one could also think of the author of my novel, who fell asleep in the middle of smoking a cigarette and then had her apartment room in Rome burn down with her unconscious body inside, but then again, this is not technically considered a suicide attempt, just plain stupidity.

And then last night, when I had still not dressed up and made any serious commitments to live as such, I had stepped into the night for a few minutes, making myself participate in the vicious cycles of time, and not in order to go for a little walk, but with the sole intention of buying more cigarettes, perhaps not because I wanted them immediately or because I couldn't go through the night without them, but only because just like it is the case of a good lover or a work of art, the only subjection to the laws of necessity is the common knowledge that they are there, unmovable, staring into you, almost salvaging your skin but yet at a distance discreet enough not to be preferred over simpler things of the world such as wisdom and fear. Yesterday had been a different day though, because the guilt of having slept in 3 hours more than the sun, blocked my access to the Garden of Paradise, when one could unchoose innocence for himself.

"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

done eis requiem.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

done eis requiem sempiternam." -Mozart, "Agnus Dei" in "Requiem Mass in D minor"

[Lamb of God, who takest away the sins

of the world,

Grant them rest.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins

of the world,

Grant them everlasting rest.]

Yet while standing by the front door I took a glimpse of the night, not that I hadn't done that before but then it appeared to me as if the night could no longer salvage me, everything looked so familiar at standstill, clean from the usual tortured landscapes that I drew from my bed holding the novel in between my hands; the trees stood at the same distance from the sky as they always had, it didn't seem particularly dangerous to be alive on that night, and all the turbulent sense of uneasiness hung only from my fingertips and not from the rooves of the houses or the tree tops like I had thought the last time I had really seen a night.

I did feel however that I was dying, no more intensely than I had in other days, but the feeling was then rational and the painless discomfort of the stomach, the taste of food in my mouth, near complete exhaustion, the weight of the eyelids and the fickle of lost desire, all of it, reminded me that it was a fact that I was dying; and while it wasn't from one particular disease or another - what only made matters worse, I found it perplexing and irksome that other people didn't feel the same while the years, meticulously cut into seconds, were tearing themselves away from their hands.

It was a butterfly, and not my own physical discomfort with the "now", what had set free my anxiety. So beautiful this butterfly had been, perhaps even young, lying there dead, the wings still open in an unambiguously glowing yellow, visible even in so late an hour of a wet night in which the asphalt, the trees, the cars, the houses and the night itself seemed to blend into one and only uniform colour that made it impossible to distinguish water from mud. I wondered oftentimes what had been the cause of death and nature didn't come up in my mind as the most gullible murderer; I thought that perhaps the butterly, just like me, had spent too many days of youth lying on a bed of roses, atop a tree, reading a certain novel, and had suddenly died because on account of that.

The wings were shockingly intact, like the skin of a wolverine, a thick smithering yellow that doesn't turn into ochre and bathed in black dots of opal, whereas the tiny body, slender as it was, had already turned half into dust, half into sand, yet nothing rotten, as if flesh had never existed. I began to imagine the nest of leaves and roses where the butterfly had died in the middle of reading a novel, only because I had all over me this stench of eucalyptus that couldn't have come from any other place than the carpet that the wings offered me in lieu of conversation. "Dead things", I thought.

At that hour I craved for the morning, not for the "now", but for the morning at least, and kissed good-bye to my gentle butterfly friend, and the opaque breeze wouldn't have left me for the whole night hadn't it been for a phone call, strange as it sounds. There is a man, a musician, perhaps a lover but definitely a stranger who calls me on the phone every single day of the week at 23:30 on the dot, not missing one single night. The strict punctuality of that romance reminds me often not of love, but of the Viennese public administration, and the endless forms at the old institute of Christian philosophy, that you have to fill paragraph by paragraph, well into dozens of pages, to be turned in in three different places, at three different hours of the day and in different colors, only in order to use a rotten desk with a stench of moth and a broken leg. I can't even imagine the kind of bureaucracy that it would take to love a thing or even worse, a person.

I never thought that punctuality as such, the supreme value of all in my view, would become a recipe for romantic bureaucracy, and while I enjoy the "now" of it all, I might not survive for too long in the narrow space of sentiments rigorously filed by a public servant. I might not be voting for him after all. That's what happens when dreams come true, a lover that always calls on time, a lover that you have never met, therefore you remember him with the greatest fondness usually reserved for dead people and for paintings. A dream that comes true is usually a one-way ticket into the land of regret, and that's perhaps the reason why the world looks a little bit like hell, but with cheaper seats - too many people living out of dreams.

In the meantime, as I navigated through the meticulous conversation, highly intellectual and socially responsible, my mind drifted away, into dreams so different as they were ill, into impossible dreams that were not dreams after all but the most distant geography of vigilant hopes - the world to come cannot have a name; I began sketching conversations out of the simplest gesture of a certain friend or lover that never called, the eternal muse at work in my novel, the simplest finger on the wrist, a line dotted over sand or an empty table in an old cafe, that's all what is needed for a novel; the grandeur of perfect understanding is useless for friendship and for art, there can grow no great love where there's not an abyss between world and man, and between man and man.

I thought about my fragile state of mind, ever so changing, like the wings of a butterfly - that I found still as dead the morning after just a few doorfronts from mine, and the glowing yellow turned out to be orange instead; either I was deceived or the butterfly was getting younger and younger as the dead days walked into the numbness of the wait. I remember a certain theologian friend, G., in a big German city, can't remember exactly which, and how we had once spoken about clinical depression when a friend had been confined to an asylum against his will and how the theologian friend remarked that depression as such is not "life-as-it-happens-to-be" like I had thought but more like a failure of human communication.

It could be still true that all human relationships, or at least the hope thereof, are fundamentally based upon such failure, certainly the world of art is, otherwise there would make no sense to subject oneself to the cruel passage of time, and if I hadn't failed to communicate something at least once, even within the borders of my own person, it wouldn't make sense to write after all. I conquer the morning, before the sun, completely dressed up, only in order to write once more and to not let my deathbed become the sole geographical location of the novel, which is not really a novel but a letter that can never be sent, because it is impossible to finish writing it or send it "today" and I wouldn't know where to send it after all. Somewhere in France, by the seashore, so completely alone, he is sunbathing in the winter sand, oh sanderling, the sun today feels like the sand in your hand. It is not today, even. Only one thing I remember from the novel I was reading: "...and Vienna keeps silent".

De Schilder bezoekt het strand

De zijn de bewegingen:

Lopen(d)

Zitten(d)

Staren(d)

Een strandloper, een steltloper

vlucht voor de vloed

Nauwering sprokkelen de ogen

soms heeft hij het hoofd

Spreekt tot de einders

een overzijde onder handbereik

Zijn tong aarzelt

waar het blauw eindigt. -Hans van de Waarsenburg

[The Painter visits the seashore]

[These are the motions:

Walk(ing)

Sit(ting)

Gaze(ing)

A sanderling, a stilt-walker

In a flight, over the flood of the tide

The eyes gather, so carefully

Sometimes, a head tilts up

He speaks, to the skyline

At hindsight, the further side

The tongue vacilates

Then, where the blue ends.]

POSTSCRIPT

The music still plays, all day long, he awaits a whole day, singing aloud, to pick up the headset at 23:29 to make that call at 23:30 so that I will answer at 23:31; but on that fateful day, I wasn't home, I had gone to Den Haag, and since it was a little late to stroll around Scheveningen or Wassernaar, I sat in a small kroeg, around "De Passage", on the Buitenhof and looking into the water and the Mauritiushuis, there is nothing familiar here other than the dog shit in the street corners, and the calls for prayer in a nearby mosque; how deserted it's become, I thought. I am soothed by singing to myself an old popular song, thinking that perhaps I would be in France, so far away, not at home and not in Den Haag, toying with the sand, it's not 6:00 or 23:30, but it is only "now" and "today", the perfect timing for a letter.

"Als ik weg ben voorgoed uit dit land

Als ik woon bij Monton of bif Nice

In een bungalow bij het strand

Waar het weer niet zo guur is en vies

Lig ik fijn in de zon op mijn rug

Om mij heen bloeit de rozamarijn

Ik wil nooit meer naar Holland terug

En ik denk vals: hoe zou het er zijn?

Nog zo nat, nog zo kil

Wat voor weer zou het zijn in Den Haag?" -Annie M. G. Schmidt

[When I am gone for good from this land

When I will be living in Monton or in Nice

In a little bungalow by the seashore

Where the weather is not evil and bleak

I lie on my back in the sun

The rosemary growing in me

I will never see Holland again

And then I will think: What should it be like?

Not so wet, not so cool

What should the weather be like in Den Haag?]

Today (in progress)

"O al - ter Duft aus Mär - - chen-zeit" ("Oh old fragance from mythical times": from "Pierrot lunaire" of Schönberg)


"I: Austrian passport issued by the Interior Ministry. Sworn certificate of nationality. Brown eyes. Blond hair, born in Klagenfurt, followed by several dates and profession, crossed out and amended twice, addresses, crossed out thrice, above of which can be read, written in calligraphy: residence at Ungargasse 6, Vienna III.

Time: Today

Place: Vienna.

The temporal index had left me pensive for good while, for it is almost impossible for me to say "Today" even though the people often say or, better yet, are ought to say "today" everyday; but if anybody tells me what he endeavours to do today - let alone tomorrow-, I do not react absentmindedly askance, as if it is often thought, but rather attentively, out of pure perplexity, !so hopeless is my relationship with that so-called "today"!, for I can only pass through such "today" in terrible pangs of agony and in a haste and, in the middle of this agony, to write or simply tell what is unfolding throughout; it would be then necessary to destroy immediately what is being written about today, such as the true letters are destroyed, crumpled and ultimately unsent, because insofar as they are from today, they won't make it to their final destination in any other today.

Whoever has written a frighteningly supplicant letter in order to subsequently tear and throw it away, will know better than anyone what I mean here by "today". And, who hasn't heard about those nearly illegible bank notes: "Come if you want and are able to, please. At five o'clock, at Cafe Landmann". Or telegrams such as these: "Please call me immediately full stop even today", or: "Today it is impossible".

In this fashion of things, "Today" is a word that only suicidal people should be permitted to use, but for all the rest it doesn't have absolutely any sense, it only serves to designate any other day, precisely today they are aware that, once again, they will have to work eight hours or take a free day for themselves, they know that they will go this or that way, will buy some other thing, will read a morning or an evening paper, they will drink a cup of coffee, they will surely forget about something, will turn up for an appointment, will have to ring up somebody, a day, in the course of which, in brief, something will have to happen or, better said, not too many things will happen.

I, on the other hand, after I pronounce "today", I begin to breath at intervals, suddenly I am possessed by that arrythmia that had been already diagnosed in an electrocardiography, and if the line in the graph does not grant the supposition that the real cause was my "today" - always new and oppresive -, I can put forward the evidence to the syndrom, redactable in voluble medical codes, the proof of something that precedes the crisis of my agony, and predisposes me to it, in accordance to what the medical specialists have always said and thought. But I am afraid that it is "today" what so badly drives me into the agony, what is in excess extravagant and pathetic, and that "today" will always remain fixed in my mind as such a pathological agony, until the very last breath." -Ingeborg Bachmann, "Malina"



I always knew that there had to be something utterly misgiving with this whole talk about "Today"; at the expense of a negation, it's a disease, or at best, the guilty resignation to a capital punishment, but I wasn't entirely sure about this until I read it in a novel, though the novel is sited in a far-away city where a friend of mine happens to live, I could enter on my own, it was the same cycle of asffixiation by-product of this eternal entanglement with today, for under normal circumstances -and all circumstances in life are normal unless it's a case of love, the gesture of time is always Janus-faced, and contemplation is not tolerated, even in unsual cases of uncalled-for romance, starting into for too long is a common form of molestation. Living today, everyday, is tantamount to never ever sleeping, thus the clean surface of the present is always edgy, only interrupted by the absurdity of daydreaming, while yet bereft of sleep; ten long years and yet not one single rapture of the eyelid into the movement of the hours. Not for a single moment though, it occurred to me that I was dying, except for my behaviour, erratic, always signaling that I was ought to conquer the world down and above, even if it meant to give up on peace or temporary cease-fire, everything had to be won and then lost in one and the same day. The slightest breach in my sound protocol of belligerence would amount not only to negligence on my part but to failure, retreat and total defeat. And, since I adamantly refused to be consoled in any way, there were only so many ways in which the state of panic could be driven away - embalming of healthy living human beings, being one of them. Embalmed in a cavas I had myself chosen but for a more splendid occasion, like that of a technically possible victory. The past, even the most immediate whim, was never granted a moment of rest, being all too frightened by forgetfulness, so that it was ought to be carved out with scalpel, mummified, nullified, hence conserved intact, a thousand and one years before the time was ripe, abandoned, ownerless somewhere, exposed as the celebrated prize of a meticulous and carefully planned robbery. The morning I returned to the plaza, I had felt less ailing than usual, free of guilt, if anything only because because I was almost entirely deprived of sleep and not fully committed to the destruction of the hours that lay ahead, they seemed so vague and vacuous, almost soundless and continuous, another hopeless eternity, like a whole century of peace. There I sat, idly, reading Mrs. Dalloway, laughing with the belly button but without the gestures of the mouth, and I sat at the same table, in the same position, with the same scarf, but only a few hours earlier, in the solid but futile attempt to catch one simple glance of his, to feel again the warm finger accidentally falling upon my wrist; yet I manage to feel nothing, the well of the vision had dried, because once I've put it down in writing, it's all been completely forgotten, as if it had been a mass burial for my armies. Perhaps I'm not even chasing after the vision, but just making sure that it doesn't haunt me. It's so fragile, on a revel, at the bank of a river, melted into the air of other ages, already invisible. I no longer capture the essence, all the images are seizeable; all the trees at the same height, the order of the bricks and stone, the vendors in their tents, black doves, ponds of mud and rainfall, the Holiday mood in the pace of the streetwalkers, a timid drizzle stepping on my shoe, especially the slow speed of everything, there seems to be just too much time available now. There's still the weak hesitation of feigned visions, the terrifying sensuality of remembering at all. The way we live now, the way we live today.