Saturday, August 31, 2013

Not Kyoto

- Written while listening to the soundtrack Suleyman the Magnificent, which you can find here.

For years, when the deepest longing to be somewhere else has struck me, Kyoto or Nara has always been the destination.  The little place in my heart that stores up treasures would tune its shamisen and play me memories of Todaiji, of the Philosopher's Path.

Tonight, I'm longing for the other end of the Silk Road, and it's not the crowded, graceful, grey-tiled roofs and reserved buddha-gazes of those ancient places that I want.  Another imperial city calls to me instead.

Ah, God, to be in Istanbul with the light fading from the sky, to see the Bosphorus changing from blue-green to watered silver silk under the light of a waxing moon.  To be able to look up and see the minarets piercing the growing night like needles occupied with stitching the heavens to the earth.  To be able to hear the muezzins of Sultanahmet and Ayasofya calling the azan, that incredible moment when the accidental harmonies inevitably occur, stopping the breath and the heart with only sound.

To stumble over rough cobblestones in cool air to a place where a meal as simple or as complicated as the palate can stand is waiting.  To be with friends who complement, contrast, embrace without questions, even if you've only known them for days that have somehow become lifetimes.

To feel History (very much with a capital H) surround you like an embroidered garment of many silken layers that flutter in the wind, showing now this embellishment, now this flaw in the pattern.  To be surrounded constantly by faded empires, to see the still-glorious monuments of world-rulers now returned to dust.

I yearn for Byzantium, for Constantinople, for Istanbul. Tonight I will sleep and walk there again, feel the cold marble of Ayasofya trail beneath my dreaming fingers, watch the crowds surge like the steady tides.  No distance can keep all of it from me.  One tiny corner I have managed to carry away for myself for the times - like now - when I have the most need.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

The Gap

Have you ever been somewhere you just don't fit?  Maybe it used to be a place that made sense for you or maybe you used to be different.  Now, though, just the thought of having to be there makes you uneasy.

I have one of those places, and the dread of encountering it on a regular basis gets worse as time goes by.

When I'm at work or when I'm with my friends, I'm comfortable.  I feel like the people I am around know me on at least some type of basic functional level.  I am an individual with some sort of value.  Maybe they love me.  Maybe they hate my guts.  Whatever it is, they are basing those decisions on current knowledge of me as a person, not the offspring of so-and-so, not the assumption that all people everywhere do the same things in the same ways.

When I'm at this other place, I feel like people neither know who I really am nor very much care.  They know I'm not like them, and that's good enough.  I haven't followed the paths they have.  For a lot of reasons, I have wound up doing some fundamentally different things from most of them.   I didn't go to school here.  I don't work around here.  I am not married.  I'm not dating.  I don't have small children.  I like to travel mostly alone to places most of them consider bizarre, and I would love to live in most of those places as well.  I'm not passing any kind of value judgement here, that my way or their way is better.  I'm just saying they're not the same, and it causes problems.  Sometimes, I think maybe they might not know what to say to me.  And I suppose that's fair enough, since mostly I can say that's true from my side, too.  There is no commonality, and they're content to watch me from the corners of their eyes.

For my part, I endure and run.

It's all well and good to say, "Well, if it makes you that uncomfortable, why don't you stop going there?"  Reality tends to be a great deal less clear-cut and precise.  There are ties that bind, ties that become bonds in the strongest sense of that word.  I don't know how to get out of them.  I just know that every time I am there, I want to be away a little more and a little faster.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Variation on a Theme

In the past two days, I have found myself enthusing over Chris Thile's new Bach album (more about that later) and the YouTube video series Thug Notes.  My first reaction to these in juxtaposition was that they were very different things.  After a little thought, though, I'm not so sure.

What I appreciate about both of them is that they're taking things I traditionally enjoy (Bach, literature) and putting a distinctive personal touch on them (mandolin, thugness).  You have to be very clever and very good at what you do to pull reinterpretation of a masterwork off correctly.  You can take do pale imitations all day long, but to make a genuine new version of something already great means you have to understand the work in question thoroughly.

I think of it like Picasso's art.  Everyone associates him with Cubism and abstraction.  How many people remember that before he found his own new style that he made sure he was a master of traditional techniques?  He admonished people to "[l]earn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."  It's not that he couldn't paint in the more traditional way; it's that he had mastered and surpassed it.

Even though it may seem odd to put a YouTube series in the same category with Thile and maybe both of them with Picasso to some people, I can't help but see their relationship to one another.  True interpretation leads to a new invention all of its own.