Outside the Bazaar was the daylight world, my everyday world: our house at the school overlooking the Bosphorus and its commanding view of the crenellated battlements of Rumeli Hisar and the (then) sparsely-populated hills of Asia beyond rolling down to the famous channel—the veritable soul of the city—as yet unshackled by bridges. 

Outside were the squares in which Omar Khayyam’s Sultan had exchanged his noose of light for bouquets of pigeons—gathered expressly to be stampeded by boys—that exploded from the ends of my outstretched arms, rose and traced long ellipses around the symmetrical clusters of domes pushing up through the city’s ancient canopy.

Outside was the unique profile of that canopy, a skyline drawn and dominated not by the spirit of commerce, as in so many modern cities, but the commerce of spirit. I especially remember it from the vantage point of a hired fishing boat chugging down the Bosphorus on a bright day: the vista in which the eye’s brilliant flight broke against, and at once was healed by, the elegant stipplings of minarets and cypress in their dreaming transactions with the Invisible, suturing together earth and sky along the city’s crest.

Outside was the vast music of Istanbul whose soloists, in this child’s memory, were the muezzins and the hot corn, simit, paper halvah and water vendors, all singing out their respective nourishments. Backing them was a horn section led by the oil tankers whose stately passage through the Bosphorus was announced by an extended basso profundo blast that, like the channel itself, bridged the Black and Marmara seas, not with water but with a flash flood of sound, an oratorio condensed into pure fanfare that would have charmed the likes of Gabrieli or Handel. (Despite the exuberant gravitas of those calls, it was their aftermath I awaited, the brief and magical twilight reign of the echo.  Magic is bred of night knowledge, a creature of a shadow land far from the C-major verities of day and, accordingly, it was the shadowy tail of the tanker’s bellow that fed my youthful wonderology.  Held by the sustaining pedal in the Thracian hills, the echo held in turn the intimations of a wilder music; like a great work of art it granted the imagination a fleeting conjugal visit with the horizon. Quasi una fantasia.  To paraphrase Eliot, I was the echo while the echo lasted.)  Sounding at more regular intervals were the jubilant three-‘whoop’ calls of the car ferries shuttling their clutches of men and metal between the shores of Europe and Asia.  And in the harbor of Bebek at the foot of our hill, the silent grace notes: the small brightly-painted fishing boats swaying from side to side and davening in their moorings beneath the cobbled embankment, rising and falling in the neverending ripple and chop like the flotsam of a shattered rainbow.

Excerpt from Ganesha’s Mouse, Book 1 

An exquisite 6 minute aria.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTkZRO-FYTM

Secret implicit within you, the hidden, the deepest

Knowledge of all you will ever unfold

In this body of earth.

 Kathleen Raine

Men prevent one another from being men

but in the great spaces of death

the winds of the afterwards kiss us into blossom of manhood.

 DH Lawrence

Death is not ‘natural’.  There was a time in the history of the earth when death did not exist–the time of primitive worms and amoebas.  Instead of dying, the amoeba simply divides into two.  It does not die, but its life is one of total stagnation.  Death brought individuality into the world, and the struggle for existence.  And this struggle brought evolution.  If you place a gun against a man’s head, he suddenly knows very clearly that he wants to live.  Death is the gun placed against the head of all living creatures, the goad of evolution.

Colin Wilson

The divine spirit survives man because death is the freedom of God just as life, modeled on death, is the test of the freedom of man.

Edmond Jabès

To philosophize is to learn how to die.

Montaigne

Leonardo sought to reveal the hidden workings of whatever his eye landed on and, at the most elementary level, I imagine that the problem solver in him delighted in the challenge of untieing the interwoven skeins of river vortices.  While keeping his hand and eye nimble, like practicing scales, rendering the protean skeleton of a plunge pool must have been as satisfying for him as the completion of a London Times acrostic for a puzzle fanatic. But, at a deeper level, I think that Leonardo had apprenticed himself to the vortex. The restless desire that drove him to unravel the infinite watery braidings of the human body through his study of cadavers also brought him to river banks to dissect the organs of muscular currents. His eye craved sharpening against the quick as well as the dead, for, as his notebooks clearly testify, the entire world was his whetstone.  He returned repeatedly to the vortex as one returns to knock on a closed door or an unanswered question.  It insisted itself on his consciousness, drew itself again and again to his attention where it might be seen and understood, entered and anatomized. I believe that at some anonymous moment, Leonardo perceived in a flash of freedom how water keeps the heart nimble. Piercing its mirror, he gazed into the dearest freshness deep down in turbulence and glimpsed the silver world of Flow. And in doing so, enrolled himself in water’s mystery school

Excerpt from Ganesha’s Mouse, Book 1

I am walking on a woodland path to a place where someone or something has been hurt or is suffering.  I approach a large door and see many dogs lying about outside. They have been attracted by the suffering of the person inside and are keeping vigil.  I poke my head in over the threshold and am aware of many people inside to the left – the feeling of a large airy cave.   I am greeted by the old woman who works there at the door.  She has the words Abide with me, true dark written in chalk on a wall nearby.

Frederick Carter – Night

Andrei Tarkovsky

Edmond Jabès

Excerpts from E. J.’s “The Book of Questions”

***

The wound has the rose as childhood friend.

———

You are silent: I was.  You speak: I am.

———

A cradlesong is a mirror of words to put a child to sleep in its glance.

———

All our songs originate in the sacrifice of our wings and our longing to fly.

———

We speak to what is blossoming.   What listens is shedding its leaves.

———

A writer questions himself forever in the infinite solitude of God whose gesture he has inherited, but with its fire gone out.   Rekindling the divine gesture again and again, this is our contribution to the light.

———

God disdains memory.   He travels.

———

Dawn is more than a hope, it is an elect full of fresh fervor.   Straining towards what it to come, his ties cut, man when he is finally free gorges himself on eternity.   His gravity lies in being available and great, in the vacancy of a moment which will fuse with his life.   Not to expect anything and yet to die daily of infinite expectation.

———

We are closer to one another than to ourselves.

———

Childhood is a colony of astonished words.

———

You are opened by your eyes.

 ———

You enter the night, as a thread enters a needle,

through an opening propitious or bloody,

through the most luminous breach.

Being both thread and needle,

you enter the night

as you enter yourself.

Translated by Rosemary Waldrop

and premonition of the dream,

you are the invisible itself in the spring,

at the place of its emission, like the invisible itself in the flame,

its essence, at the place very pure and safe,

where the frail heart of the flame is a ring of sweetness…

 St.-Jean Perse

Photo :  E. Atget