Coming Apart at the Seams

Today, during the process of getting my daily dose of stomach acid reading about Turkey, I came across an article about Brazil.  I suppose the news service I use just decided to lump all the protests together.  The whole damn world is falling apart and the governments thereof are sitting in a corner covering their eyes and ears and pretending it's all okay.

I was in Brazil last summer at this very time.  It is surreal for me to think back over the oddly empty and quiet government buildings that we toured in Brasilia as now being the center of a protest movement.  I look at the pictures of the senate building, all clean lines and Niemeyer angles, and I'm trying to imagine that people overran it and are standing on top of it, that the government ran away.  It's either pure insanity or the beginning of hope.  God knows I'm not wise enough to know which.  Maybe it's both.  Maybe change is made of both.

Some of the protests that have happened lately are very specific.  People have a clear message for their government.  You're spending too much of our money.  You're stealing a bunch of our resources and running away.  You're sticking your fingers into our privacy, our choices.   You're destroying our freedom. We don't like it.  You should quit.

Some of them are not.  People are just generally pissed and gathered.  There is an unnamed sense of unhappiness that spreads or a small thing that touches off a deep-seated pocket of explosive issues.

What's happening to us all?  I used to think that it was just our government here in the States that was fairly out of touch with its constituents.  We always have some scandal or ridiculous sneaky crap going on.  If the people running our nation used half as much passionate ingenuity in solving problems and bettering their country as they do trying to line their own pockets, accrue power, clandestinely pursue illegal activities, and sink the "other guy," we'd probably all live in solid-platinum houses on Mars.  (I'm just saying.)   It's probably been that way since 1776.  Maybe there were times when it abated, but maybe it's always there when governments are more worried about their own power than they are about the good of the people they represent.  Right now seems to be one of those moments where everyone everywhere is just tired of it.

What will happen to us all?  What's coming next?  As always, that old Yeats poem is sneaking around in the back of my head.  Clearly, the center is not holding.  What now?  I'm afraid we are living in what that ancient Chinese proverb calls "interesting times," and you know all about that.....

Turkey Again

I am keeping up with the news on Turkey daily.  What I see makes me more and more concerned.  Something that started as a protest over a public space has turned into an issue big enough to rend a nation.

I do not really feel qualified to comment much on the events I see there.  I am at best an interested outsider.  I can't understand some of the things I see, though, and feel compelled to ask a question.  How do leaders get so out of touch that they refuse to hear the voices of those who put them in power?  If unrest suddenly breaks out in large sections of a nation, I'm not sure I think an elected official should use threats and force to keep themselves in power.

I can't form absolute opinions about Turkey's current situation because everything I'm getting about it is from a few sources, and, of course, both sides are accusing each other of editing for greatest political currency.  As I scroll through images of tear gas, emergency hospitals, water cannons, and the like, though, I wonder if it looks the same to us on the outside as it does to the people affected.  I throw my mind back to the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I remember how divided my own nation was about that.  All I guess I can say with any certainty is that it looks an awful lot like a situation that will end in many more people being wounded or killed.

In addition to thinking about the situation in general, I am also concerned about my upcoming trip. I don't mean to be selfish.  Surely the events that are unfolding are so much more important than just one trip for one group of foreign tourists.  However, I have been excited about this trip for a long time now, and as I have come to know more about this country, so too has my eagerness to see and experience it all increased. I can't help but wonder if we will even get to go at all, if all this will just wind up being a place I yearn to see and never have access to.  I also have to say that I sometimes wonder if we do go if we'll wind up caught in the riptide of this particular moment in history.  I wonder if, once again, being an American will be an uncomfortable thing abroad.

Mostly, though, I am just wondering if Turkey will manage to find a middle way or if it will collapse into the same sort of partisan turmoil that devours the land to its south.  I can only hope that the different groups can come together and somehow find peace.

Flying Roadtrip

Thursday, my best friend and I took a flying roadtrip west.  We started in Port Gibson to see the giant golden hand on the top of First Presbyterian.  From there, we went on the back road that never ends to see Windsor Ruins.  Finally, we finished up in Natchez where we ate at Mammy's Cupboard and toured Longwood before we had to turn back home.

I'd been on mostly this same trip last year and shot a ton of pictures.  It was so different having my friend along.  We talked in that way that people who have known each other forever can do as we traveled, and it wasn't necessarily that anything earthshattering was said.  It was just nice to have someone to say something to.

For both of us, this was sort of an abbreviated version of a long trip we took in 5th grade, the Mississippi Trip.  Both of us remember bits and pieces of that tour of our state.  My friend had a Polaroid camera, and she took pictures everywhere we went.  On this trip, she had her husband's good Nikon instead.  There was a gentle echo of that other trip so long ago as we traveled.

The sites themselves were much as I saw them last time.  Windsor didn't have a carload of thugs napping under the shade trees this time, and part of the single-strand wire fence built to keep people out of the structure was down, but everything else was just like it was before.  The big gold hand in Port Gibson was still large and golden.  Longwood was still frozen in time, silent, majestic, dreaming.

Of them all, Longwood always moves me most.  I don't know why I keep going back there.  There's something about the innovation and the forethought that Haller Nutt put into the design of that house that makes the unfinished part so much more poignant. The potential for wonder that is revealed in all the existing details is tantalizing and somehow saddening as well.  What would it have been if it could have been finished?  Would it still stand today, or would it have been torn down, burned up, forgotten and discarded?

Every tour I've had through the house has been a bit different depending on the docent.   The only thing I don't like about any of these tours is that the guides don't give you enough time inside simply to absorb the history and the feeling of the place.  It deserves a moment of quiet contemplation, of silence, of listening to the wind through the oaks outside.  It deserves a moment for the mind to paint the red brick walls with lustrous plaster, to create the missing statues in the domed niches, to remove the planks that hide the interior or the onion dome and add the mirrors that would have lit the whole house with their reflection.  Instead, there is sort of a brief patter, a quick "run-through," and next thing you know, you're being ushered politely, gently out the graceful front doors and into the nuclear heat of a Mississippi summer where, quite frankly, it is not possible to imagine much of anything that doesn't involve glacial cold.

It feels like there are a million untold stories in Longwood.  I am sure this is true of every house, past and present.  There is just something lingering in the air and the objects there, though, that invites imagination to embroider details.  There are paintings of those who lived there through time, and there are the very beds and books they used and loved.  The hand-drawn plans of what was to be created line the walls.  Tools and packing crates with hand-written address labels sit as though workers will return to tidy up soon.  Objects picked with care to provide comfort and beauty remain.  It feels like a place that lives in a half-life, wanting to be more but knowing that somnolent state is all that it will ever know.

Today is the 149th anniversary of Haller Nutt's death.  Heartbroken by the way his fates fell during the Civil War, he contracted pneumonia and succumbed.  I can't help but think that when he died, he must have been so worried about everything, his failing fortunes, his family and what would become of them after he was gone, the treatment he'd received at the hands of a government he had not defied.  He was a brilliant man by all accounts, and that shattered half-finished magnificent experiment of a house is terribly, terribly sad.  I wondered how often he stood in the center of that main floor or roamed the upper levels forbidden to modern tourists, worrying and hoping about the future, seeking some way, any way to bring some level of control and sanity back to his world.

I don't know if I'll make this same trip again, and if I do, I don't know that I will  go back to Longwood.  Likely, at some point, I will travel that way again.  There is so much in Natchez to see that I wouldn't have to go there to have something to do.  I am pretty sure I will make my way up that curving and treelined drive again, though.  The sad majesty of what awaits at the end seems to demand it.

Alif the Unseen

“A girl he loved had decided she did not love him--at least, not enough. How was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the jinn.” 
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
_____________________

I saw this book mentioned on Twitter or Facebook by one of the NPR book bloggers, and I was curious enough based upon what they said to go find it on Amazon.  Once I read the full premise, I got a sample on my Kindle.  From that point I was pretty much hooked.

I've never read anything like Alif.  It's the story of a young man of Indian-Arab heritage who lives in an unnamed totalitarian Gulf emirate.  He has created a separate online life for himself.  He works as a programmer/hacker whose programs serve any organization fighting the restrictions of the government.

He has fallen in love with a beautiful, intelligent woman from a rich family.  When that relationship falls apart, he decides to use his computing skills to grant her last request of him, that she should never see him again.  What comes of his fit of anger and sadness is unexpected.  It will lead him into the world of the jinn, a world that has always lain side by side with his everyday world without his knowledge.

Alif is part political protest, part fairy tale.  Some of the events feel very current since it seems that hardly a week goes by without mention of some government who is seeking to control their people by controlling their access to the Internet.  The world of the jinn creeps up on the reader in the same way it creeps up on Alif and his companions.  By the time he's immersed in the deepest part of it, their city and way of living seems entirely possible.  Different, but possible.

I guess this book fits most neatly into the category of fantasy with a side-order of sci-fi.  That label is a bit misleading, though.  It spans other genres; bildungsroman, political theory, and philosophy are all there, too. There is a muted but still moving love story.  Issues of gender and cross-cultural communication are explored.

Then there's the hero himself.  Alif, like most of us, thinks his actions and his motivations are fairly good ones.    Even though he is selfish, careless with those who care for him, and self-isolated from the world around him, he thinks the way he's chosen to live is the right path. What he discovers is that reality has a way of stripping away illusion, even the ones we keep about ourselves.  This, then, is a story of a person becoming attuned to the real told through the profoundly imaginary.  It's lovely.

One of the most important things this book addresses is what it means to be free.  How can we keep ourselves free?  What should we do with freedom when we have it?  What is the price of freedom?  While this may seem trite, the way Alif deals with it is thought-provoking, especially in a time in which government surveillance of our online lives has been confirmed.  (Hi, PRISM.  Scan me.  Go ahead.  Scan me.)

This book is probably the best thing I've read this summer.  In fact, it's one of the best books I've read in quite awhile, period.  I would love to see some kind of sequel with more of the world of the jinn in it.  I think the possibility for that exists in a couple of ways.  I don't know if Ms. Wilson will pursue this storyline or not. What I do know is that as it stands, Alif the Unseen was a profoundly original work in a sea of copycat fiction.  It is very much worth your time.

First Blackberrying of the Year

After walking the dogs this afternoon, I walked over to the blackberry bramble at the edge of my pasture and looked over the current crop.  I picked a few, just a small handful, and came back inside.  Chewie, being Chewie, watched me pick the berries and eat them, and he started nibbling them off the bushes.  I laughed at him, and he stopped long enough to give me a giant toothy grin before returning to his efforts.  He's a strange dog, but he's all mine.

After dinner, I kept thinking about the blackberries. I decided that I would go up to our country place tomorrow and see if the brambles there were bearing yet.  Then I looked up some recipes on Pinterest.  This led to combing through my Granny's recipe box looking for her cobbler recipe.  I realized that I had to have more and that I didn't want to wait.

The beauty of summer is that the days linger gloriously.  Even though it was fairly late, the tops of the trees were still golden. Grabbing a leash and Chewie, I headed out to our place in the country and the tons and tons of blackberries that grow there. Chewie loves it there.  I had the windows down, and as soon as we came around the last curve before the gate to the property, he sniffed the air and started woofing softly.  We made our way down to the brambles, and I picked until it got too dark to ensure I wasn't about to step in the middle of a snake. Chewie and I found our way back to the car in the last blue-purple light of sunset and the dim glow of a fingernail moon.

Blackberries are tricky and imperious little devils.  They are not a "something for nothing" fruit.  There is nothing docile or generous about them.  They're primadonnas.    If you go to pick what they have produced, they are going to take from you as well.  Usually I get hung on one of the vines and cut my arm or hand open. I have always thought of it as the "blood sacrifice" required to complete the picking. Today, as I carefully reached around the thorns and plucked the ripe berries, I felt the waving tendrils of green grab at my shorts, tenaciously hook my tshirt, and finally one reached out and snagged a handful of my hair. It was surprisingly strong, and it required a little careful finesse to free myself.  If you flail once a bramble captures you, it's kind of like that plant Devil's Snare from Harry Potter - more and more of them grab hold making the situation worse. Once I managed to extricate myself, I apparently had paid my tithe.  Nothing else attacked me.

Chewie watched the whole thing from a safe distance.  He ran careful circles around the reach of the brambles, caused a large wild turkey to explode upwards into the treetops with a sound like a localized hurricane, rolled rapturously in the tall grass, and wore his nose off chasing scents.  Eventually, he flopped down and watched me, moving only when I went to another section of the bramble.  I offered him a berry I'd picked, but he apparently had his fill earlier.  He sniffed it, mouthed it, and spit it out before looking up at me with a hopeful wagging tail.  Apparently, he's decided he'd rather have his bacon treats instead.

In a fairly short time, I managed to fill a quarter of the gallon-sized ziplock bag I'd taken with me.  I brought the berries home, washed them, and put them in the refrigerator.  I don't know what I'll do with them.  I might indulge in one of the recipes I found.  I might make a mini-cobbler.  Probably, though, I'll just nibble them whole and savor that special taste of summer and home and deep woods pasture land.  That is probably special enough a recipe all on its own.

My Name Is Red

I've been working on My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk for about a week now in my continuing effort to learn more about the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in general.  Pamuk, a Nobel Prize winner, was recommended by one of the leaders of our trip, and My Name is Red in particular was specified as a good starting place for his work.  I got it on Kindle and headed into it.

I wasn't prepared for the journey that awaited me.  For general information, you can click through to the Wikipedia page. The novel deals with a community of artists in 16th century Istanbul, the miniaturists.  Each chapter is told by a different voice, but the main characters repeat throughout.  This reminded me a lot of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  (I know.  I see links where there probably are none, the the similarities are remarkable.)  The chapters are short and intricate, like the very miniatures the characters are commissioned with creating.  At first, I had no idea what was going on and who was involved.  It starts very much in medias res, and the first voice you hear is actually the voice of a dead man.  Once I got used to the flow of the novel and started to figure out who was linked to whom, it was charming.

The work has so much to enjoy.  First of all, there is all the historical research that must have been involved.  The time period is described so clearly.  That, however, pales when compared to the technical aspect of its creation. I cannot imagine the difficulty of maintaining no fewer than twelve narrative voices, one of which is actually the "split personality" of another.  Each character has a distinct and realistic voice and view on the world. It's an amazing accomplishment to see the world through so many eyes.

Woven into the plot of murder and intrigue is a healthy dose of folklore, custom, and even costuming.  It was a perfect choice for me to read just now because it perfectly accompanied the course text and readings we had.  So many of the things the text described were humanized and made accessible through the story.  Stories about famous characters from folk tales, poetry, songs, patterns of behavior, even architecture is presented in such glorious detail.  Every chapter really was a little picture.

I have another book by Pamuk, his Istanbul, which is quite different, a set of memoirs of the city he grew up in and still lives in today.  I have a few other things I want to read first, but it's in my near future.  It will be interesting to see how he continues to reveal this place I am becoming increasingly more and more fascinated with.

Lightning (Bug and Other)

As I came home tonight, the sky was full of stars.  Suddenly, though, everything flickered.  The sky itself was green for seconds, parts of seconds, and then it plunged back into the deepest blue.  Lightning from the oncoming storm had ripped away the illusion of calm.

We're still too far away from whatever is coming to hear the thunder, but everything has that horrible stillness that happens right before a big rain, and the last two days, I've been sick in the bed with a migraine, so I am guessing that something epic is marching towards us.

I took the dogs out for a late evening stroll, and as we made our way through the pasture, thousands of little tiny flashes of light filled the low tree limbs and the underbrush.  The lightning bugs, usually to be found at the tops of the trees, were low because of the atmospheric pressure.  It looked like the edges of the woods had been strung with countless fairy lights, but even that beauty managed to be ominous because of the reason for its presence.

There are so many other things that rumble in the distance, flash and then are gone, before sweeping over us.  Of course, I've been reading about the protests in Turkey almost ceaselessly.  It started with a flash, a sudden moment of the people together, and now it has escalated into something widespread and lasting, a storm of some duration.  It's amazing.  I pray that it won't turn any bloodier than it already is.

I am so impressed by the way the protesters are behaving.  The news articles I've read say that everything is kept clean by the protesters themselves even though there are massive (and growing) numbers of them present, that they are sharing supplies and protection with each other, that they have the support of the people in the shops and in the police to the point that stores are opening to them for places of refuge and police are not reporting to work because they refuse to be a part of confronting them.  Even while the Prime Minister calls these protests "undemocratic," even his vice secretary is apologizing for the way they protests have been handled.  It seems that everyone except one is on the same side.  I've never seen anything like it.

The more I read and study of the past, the more fascinated I am with this present.  I pray that we still get to go.  I have to see this remarkable place and these remarkable people for myself.

Not Politics. Just Hope.

I've been watching the news on Turkey carefully the past couple of days.  I also follow some people on Instagram who are there in the protests, and I see things on Tumblr from them, too.  The images have been both profoundly distressing, police in riot gear, water cannons, clouds of tear gas,  people being carried away on stretchers, blood streaming down faces. The situation, something that began over saving a public park from allegedly corrupt development, has acted as a spark to an apparently vast powder keg of other issues and has spread all over the country.  The seams are coming apart in Turkey.

And yet, there have been other images that somehow give a kind of hope in the grimness, pictures of peaceful protesters holding up books to the police who stand behind them in riot gear, groups that normally do not have much to do with each other standing shoulder to shoulder.  These immediately pulled me back to what I've been reading in my course texts.  The great strength of the Ottoman Empire was in its tolerance and acceptance of "the other," according to the book we have been required to read.  Unlike most of the rest of medieval Europe, at its height, the Empire based worth on what you could do as much as where you were from or whom you worshipped.  Different did not have to mean evil or marked for destruction under their rule.  Instead, "different" mean exactly that, not the same, but not unworthy.  Even the "big three" religions managed to find a way to coexist there in what, when compared to the rest of the world at that time, can be considered to be mostly peaceful.  Not total equality or total freedom, but mostly peacful. It was not any sort of democratic or Utopian paradise, but it was something beyond the Inquisition and the pogroms.

That same idea of tolerance and unity seems to be showing up in these protesters.  One news article I read talked about how people from different ethnic groups, people from different regions, even people from rival soccer teams are coming together in these protests against the increasing strictness of the current government.  Even though the violence and the injuries that are accompanying them are terrible, there is something remarkable about that unification of differences.

As the readings for this course have made me more aware of the history of the Ottoman Empire, I have realized suddenly just how much the lands it used to control are still in flux, still searching for themselves in the wake of its decline.  Surely most of us probably think of nations as something permanent, something always there, even those of us living in a nation as new as this one.  The truth of it is that the people of Turkey (and everywhere else that the Ottomans once governed) are less than ninety years out of the rule of a government that held some of them, for better or for worse, for more than six centuries.  The powers of the West that carved the dead empire up into pieces and parcels for themselves after its demise have only prolonged the process of growth, of a necessary forging of identity.  Therefore, even though they are standing on ancient foundations, they are new construction, and probably we should not be surprised that they change as that process continues.

I very much hope that the protests in Turkey come to some form of peaceful and...well...right...resolution.  That may sound very naive.  It may actually be so.  I do not pretend to be wise enough to know what "right" is in this case.  It's not my land; they aren't my issues, even though one of the sources of unrest is the NATO presence on the Syrian border.  However, Turkey has been making great strides economically and a time of seemingly slow renaissance for its place in the world has started.  I think it would be terrible if that forward motion and self-definition were damaged by the usual suspects:  selfishness, powermongering, and pride.  Again, I will say that I don't know who is right and who needs to change in this moment.   I hope that, even as controversial as it might be, the legacy of that seven-hundred-year old empire can give all that was good and wise of unity and coexistence to its children and allow its darkness and bloodshed to fall away.

Summer

...and the incredible need to get out of here.  Summer.  The season where I'm rested enough to be restless.  Summer.  The time when I'm still enough to feel the lack of motion most acutely.

My parents are watching me out of the corners of their eyes again.  I don't know exactly what has brought on this new phase of my life.  They seem...I don't know...scared of what I'm going to do.  I am carrying on like I always do.  I don't perceive that I am acting any differently than usual, except of course for the fact that I'm not stressed out of my mind and I'm getting plenty of sleep.

I'm not sure what it is that they're scared I'm going to do.  Quit my job?  Purchase a big-engined fast-moving car and take off?  Shack up with somebody?  Get a giant dragon tattoo that covers my entire back? Leave and never come back?

Ah.  That last one. Maybe it's that last one.

I have a streak of pure Gypsy in my feet, that need to travel, get out, see "other where," see "other who"; they're absolutely happy if they don't even have to go in to town to Wal-Mart regularly. Maybe this is where the problem lies.

I don't know.  I just feel nervous, like I've somehow broken some kind of code I was unaware even existed, and now I must be, as Emily Dickinson said, "handled with a chain."  I hate that feeling of walking on eggshells, especially when I don't know how they got underfoot to start with.