Understanding noises

I sit on a balcony about seven stories above the noisy street. Birdsong and saws, car alarms and hammering, motorcycles, diesel vehicles, horn honking and dropped metal tools. Occasional hollaring and calls to prayer over the loudspeakers.

Beside me is a 1930s radio, which Serkan's father found and repaired a decade or so ago. The station dial has numbered frequencies, but it also lists locations all over Europe, a bit of the Middle East and northern Africa. I keep it ever on the station closest to Moskva/Moscow. The music is crazily varied, but mostly it plays jazz, big band, some blues and classical. Old music melodying out of the old speakers puts the radio to best use, at least it seems more authentic to me.

The music splashes out of its borders sometimes. Earlier this morning: Shakira, Turkish pop songs, Like a Virgin and Pet Shop Boys. Then some Sunday morning music for the kids, some choir songs and now a little opera. Friday and Saturday nights are my favorite, mostly blues and big band tunes, which remind me of one of my favorite radio shows back home. Crazy 'Bout the Blues hosted that sexy-voiced diva, Kathleen Lawton.

Now a circumcision party is parading by below. 'Tis the season for circumcision. The young boys (usually between 6-9 years old) dress up royally in white sultan-like suits with gold embroidery, crowned by fancy white hats. People here seem to hire the same red classic Mustang convertible for the parade. The boy stands up in the convertible and waves at passersby, while a line of balloon-adorned cars trails him, honking. The caboose always seems to be a pickup with three old men drumming in its bed. I wonder if they are hired too. The procession and happy boy waving is, I imagine, pre-circumcision.

I am still in Samsun. Serkan found work a few hours away, damn dam construction, dangling down a canyon on a thin cord in sweltering heat and knocking out the loose rock. There's really no way for us to be together for the next month or so. We had spent pretty much every minute together since April, which is just insane if you think about it. It's good to have a break, I tell myself, but mostly it is strange to be separated.

The idea was for me to set up shop at his parents' house, catch some solitude, run, write and so on. I've been wanting to settle down for a while and enjoy some semblance of a routine. His folks were planning to leave to "the village" for a month or so to tend the hazelnut fields. But plans change, as plans do. His dad never left and his mom is returning in a few days. So, with solitude not so solo, I am also mapping out a temporary escape. I have to hop the border anyway to renew my tourist visa.

In the meantime, I am enjoying theatrical conversations with Baba (papa). We seem to understand each other. He has the most creative ways of explaining things, using utensils or maps or pictures, and a whole lotta gestures. I can't say much, though I'm speaking more and more... as usual, my shyness decreasing over time. Mostly my end of the conversations consists of evet evet, çok güzel, iyi and other non-word sounds. (Yes yes, very pretty/nice/beautiful/etc., good.) All very positive as you can see.

Travel or Did you find what you were looking for?

Travel is a funny concept. The whys behind it. Some people travel to check continents and countries off their list, some to increase the percentage of the world they've visited for Facebook applications. Others skip off to sunny resort spots for week-long beach vacations spent mostly by the hotel pool. For some travel is a bug, an addiction. I can't say what the addiction is exactly. It's exciting, it's constant learning, expansion and the chance to test yourself a bit, in total immersion. That little thrill you get when you fly up and away, watching the city shrink below. Your mundane problems shrinking with the city. Or when you hop on a bus, leaving town A and headed to town B; those moments between places tend to grace us with extreme aliveness. That odd joy I experience on buses is reason enough for me to travel. It feels like sticking your head out the window of a car at high speed. For a moment there's too much air to take in so that you can hardly breathe, and then you do breathe, deep, full, exhilarating breaths.

This morning I was wondering, as I occasionally do, what my family and close friends must think of me sometimes. There's Heather off to another country, trying to learn another language... For what? Even if nobody else wonders, I guess I do. In Puerto Natales, there's a pretty hefty community of expats, and we are all a little nutty. Maybe everyone who lands somewhere else is either running away from something or searching for something. Before I left the States, over two years ago now, many friends said: I hope you find what you are looking for. Someone even asked me recently if I had found what I was looking for. I can't say that I've been searching for something in particular, and even if I was, I still haven't the foggiest idea of what that thing might be.

What I have found is that everything we need, we already have. There's nothing magical to discover. Maybe just a slight flip in perspective. Instead of outside, look inside. That's the stuff of enlightened beings at least. Since I am not one of those, I have to settle for vacillating. When I notice I'm looking in the wrong direction, I try to refocus. Focusing on the 'right' thing is a constant struggle of course. (Meditation helps a lot, but first you have to meditate regularly, which is also aided by a settling down of sorts.) I certainly didn't have to travel at all to come to these probably obvious realizations.

While abroad I found some things outside myself, as well, like the love of my life. So, I feel pretty darn lucky, since it was highly unlikely we would have met if I stayed in California. Who believes in destiny? :) Of course it's pretty unlikely that we met in the deep dark south of South America, too, since I'm from North America and he's from Turkey. I certainly wasn't looking for love, especially not in Puerto Natales. Now here I am in Turkey, on the road again, not settling down as planned. Travel is a funny concept and life a green live thing, as a frog or a blade of grass.

Samsun, Turkey

I'm where the mosque is loud and the new apartment construction relentless. Mornings--since I'm up anyway with the morning call to prayer or the early hammering--I 've begun to run warm and barefoot on the beach by the Black Sea between two large rivers (one named Red River, one named Green River). The rivers empty their underpinnings into the Black Sea, mixing eventually and coloring this part of the sea a kelpy brown. Yesterday the jellyfish swarmed in, looking not mystical at all, but more like spent condoms tossed to sea, and throbbing. Today, Saturday, only plastic bags and winged black ants bobbed near shore on the nods of waves.

On the shore the men yell hoarsely shouldering their hot simits for sale. "Çok sicak! Çok sicak!" (Very hot! Very hot!). The refrain echoes the small waves curling in from the sea. His voice ebbs and flows as he distances himself and boomerangs back again, back and forth on the beach for hours walking the damp, cool part of the sand. Simits are thinly rolled out rings of bread, covered in sesame seeds and baked. Whether the bearer of simits is hotly yelling about the weather or about his pretzel-like snacks is unclear. By midday the hottest part of the beach is the sand underfoot. Although the sun-warmed simits may be mildly calid.

I am becoming a fan of sesame seeds, slightly roasted. And of hazelnuts, also slightly roasted. And feta cheese, known simply as "white cheese." White cheese comes in all kinds of flavors, with varying levels of salination, underground aging and fat content. And olives, delicious black olives, slightly wrinkled. I've been bracing myself against the moment where I tire of eating olives, where I OD, so to speak, but it hasn't happened yet, and I don't think I've gone a day without munching on at least five drops of black gold.

National Geographic Accident

When I was a Freshman or Sophomore in high school, some time around 1993, I had to write a project concerning something anthropological, I reckon, although I don't remember for what class. History? English? "Social Studies"? Was Social Studies a class in high school? I can't remember any of this. In fact I don't remember much of high school at all, even though I was the most sober straight-A kid ever... for the most part. What I do remember is a mix of greasy gross cheese bread with a burp of ketchup at the midmorning break for breakfast, women's chorus at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. before school started, rabid note passing, foggy bits of the GHS LitMag meetings, and somehow--repeatedly--losing my key to the house.

But this isn't about any of that. It's about west African cultures, yellow magazines and serendipity. When I was a Freshman or Sophomore in high school, I wrote a report on the Dogon peoples of Mali. Most--if not all--of my research came at the last minute from an article I found in National Geographic, October 1990 edition. The little I'd remembered about the Dogon from this article had to do with their treatment of women: a "crazy" young girl living with her ankles shackled; and menstruating women cast away during their periods to a house adorned with vile depictions of females with huge genitals. This took up only sentences in the hefty article, and maybe didn't even make it into my school report. But it makes sense that I remember the woman parts, because of the tenuous space in womanhood that I was pubescing into, first with a deteriorating mother and then motherless among men. If I did write about the tribe's women in my report it marks the beginning of the slew of women-issue essays that I would write well into my university years.

More than the article, however, I remember my dad and brother teasing me about doing a report on a wacky culture. It was gentle teasing, the kind that might actually make you laugh, in retrospect at least. (I probably cracked only half a smile at the time.) It was the kind of teasing that occurs when there is nothing else to say. The same way that little boys and girls may flirt by hitting or making fun of each other to feel close for a moment in each others' presence. Teasing as an alternative to uncomfortable silence, which sometimes pervades whole households.

But this isn't about that either. It's about serendipity. Defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident." Horace Walpole first coined the term serendipity in a letter of January 28, 1754, where he discusses a discovery, which '"is of that kind which [he] call[s] Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."' (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/serendipity)

I can't say that I remembered that report was on the Dogon culture or that the info came out of a NatGeo mag. And I certainly wouldn't have known which year the article appeared. Memory is a fickle flimsy thing after all.

A week ago, the forgotten facts resurfaced. I was sitting in an office, waiting for Serkan while he filled out some work forms. A waiting room of sorts with a view to the Ankara skyline, the noisy streets below and Turkish conversations out of my reach on the couch across from me. I started browsing the collection of National Geographics, scanning their spines from new to old, from Turkish to English. The discomfort of waiting, not understanding my surroundings, trying to look cool and absorbed, brought me easily to Elizabeth Bishop's poem In the Waiting Room--though her little girl was 8 and I am 31. (Someday when I retell this 'story' I'll have been less than 10 years old too.)

Only about 10 NGs were in English. I wondered, in the quiet space of the thoughts beneath thoughts: What was happening in the the world while Mom was dying? And wouldn't it be crazy if I found the article I used for that report? I wouldn't be able to wait to tell Dad. He'll remember this article too and we'll share a moment. I picked out one with rainbow fishes under the sea on the cover and put it back. I skipped over the one with a Cappadocia article in it, even though we had just visited there. Then I took the collection's oldest National Geographic off the shelf and sat down with it. The feature articles were about global warming ("Under the Sun--Is Our World Warming?") and an amazing civilization of climbers with an impressive funeral culture ("Mali's Dogon People").

I read the Dogon article straight through in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion, jumping ahead at the beginning of each new paragraph to see if something in it seemed familiar. Had I read this before? Is this the fodder of that decade-old report? What are the chances of that? This article here in Turkey? I'm so close, I could go there! To Mali. To the Bandigara Cliffs. Back in time.

Ercan, Serkan's friend, asks me what I am reading so intently; is it in English? I tell him the story, maybe my voice even cracks. So much bundled inside these 27 pages, more than the article itself or its rediscovery. Briefly a parallel universe unfolded itself, unpacking distance and space and time. But what makes a discovery serendipitous anyway? Can my second encounter with the Dogon still be considered a happy accident if at some very hidden level I thought I might actually reunite with the article? Before last week, the story had meant nothing to me, not even a blip on the old radar. Now I'm not sure what the connections and reconnections mean, if anything, but I write about them anyway.

A soon to be relevant poem about falling...

...about stumbling suddenly into personhood, specifically into womanhood.
By Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorites.

In the Waiting Room
by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

ref: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15211