Passing the Throat

Originally written 12 November 2007

My Turkish classes have run for more than a week now, in a language-teaching centre operated by the University of Ankara. It is housed in a handsome art-deco-ish building that still has an Ottoman calligraphy over the front door and classrooms that give out onto a wonderland of fire escapes and crazy back walls and tiny back yards amid high chasms of those walls. It stands on a side street off the Istiklal, close to the famous Haci Baba restaurant.

Learning a new language is tiring and frustrating, but also one of my greatest pleasures, a series of revelations being sparked off as each element of the language snaps into place, with ease or difficulty, and the disjointed shards of vocabulary and structure begin to coalesce. But that is a while off yet - for now it's shards and more shards, and we feel good if we can make sentences with two words in them. I expect to post regular items on the language as it goes along, just to draw attention to some of the interesting aspects. Who knows, for example, whether the English name Anne is drawn from Turkish anne, 'mother'? And in Turkish baba means a father, grandfather or wise old man, whereas in Russian it is an old woman and in other places it is a baby.

Exotic it is, but not in the big landscapes that I'd hoped. There are nouns, verbs, adjectives just as we have them, there are recognisable accusative and dative cases, tenses and the rest. Punctuation is an unknown, word order is fascinatingly different and the famous agglutinative system of endings, in which a one-syllable root gets easily lost in two inches of baggage attached to it unless you are well attuned. I had hoped for a real space trip, to a linguistic world that was utterly different, the ways that relationships and things are named and distinguished quite other. Perhaps it is the use of familiar grammatical terminology that destroys this, flattening the parts of the language into our predetermined ideas of what verbs, nouns, etc look like and do; perhaps, from a native point of view, these things have a quite different taste. Meanwhile it is equally possible that such desired strangeness simply does not exist, because the conditions of life are so similar for all peoples of the world that the same linguistic systems, within certain limits, inevitably arise - the view of self and world, of us and them, of living thing and inanimate object, of nature and culture, the world of having to get food, of having relationships, of a public culture, of being willy-nilly a part of an economy. I will never know until the language is well established in me - at which point, of course, its newness is lost as the necessary, indeed crucial familiarity is attained, the neural paths become consolidated and one does not have to scratch around for every word and every scrap of ending to put on it. This familiarity comes at a certain cost, in losing that newness, the heights and the deeps of the language itself as experience; wearing it now for business purposes, for looking out, we forget the colour of the garment. Still, for the observant there are dwelling-places between these extremes.

As new and enjoyable as the brightly-coloured words are the people here. In our own class of twelve, two are from Mongolia (and have, apart from beginners' Turkish, no language other than their native with which to talk to anybody), one from Kyrgyzstan and one from Russian Tatarstan, another from Urumqui in Xinjiang - a veritable Silk Road of my fantasies - plus representatives of Ukraine, Argentina, Korea, Spain and the USA. Go out of our classroom into the cramped smoky cafeteria in the basement and you will find a tall, dark-eyed youth from Iran who weeps when he reads the poetry of Hafiz, a pumped-up American who turns out to be from Armenia and to speak that language perfectly, whose basketball machismo goes soft when I ask him about that country; an Italian here to research the politics of the Hittites, a posse of noisy Russian blondes, and those are the product of just one week's worth of coffee breaks. It is moving and instructive, after any exposure to the squalling of conflict as portrayed in the media, be it the railing of leaders or the blind hate of regional factions, to hear these keen young people hanging out together with complete trust and a social web - based on their all being strangers here, but also feeling themselves aristocratic in a world based on education and connectivity. Each comes as a jewel from his or her own land, yet here they are all flesh of my flesh and of one another's, their concerns are shared and life is too much fun for disagreements. I am not too old to dream, and plenty naive enough; and see how a man contains both aspects, the possibility of aggression and enmity on the one hand, in trying to defend, or establish, his own, or work out a perceived injustice, while also dreaming of harmony and peace among the nations, himself included. When it is called forth in us by a real signal, we respond.

Originally written 10 November 2007

Taking advantage of finding myself in the Old Town recently, I was drawn to visit the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque. This was, they say, the Ottoman architect Sinan’s response to the Ayasofya (Haghia Sophia), which stands at a well-proportioned distance from it across a garden. The Ayasofya, dating from the sixth century, is a thousand years older and was surely then as now the centre of the Byzantine world. One wonders at the inspiration. Was it just a display of imperial power, that happily was joined with an inspired design? Yet grandeur and the capacity to elicit wonder in the beholder were and are known, empirical variables that can be included in or left out of a building. Even then, however, the ultimate success of the place depends on an unnamed factor. I seek in vain a book on the Ayasofya other than the badly-translated, rather sterile version sold by the tat sellers outside. My real desire is for a book on the inspiration of that cathedral, rather than a dry rundown of architectural features. Maybe there is not such a one; people would rather spend their holiday attempting to digest architectural analysis than taste the condition of man that brought this place about. Then again, it is understandable why things are this way round. And of course it was in the mathematical possibility that the inspiration arose, and in a breakthrough in the possibilities of built forms.

Now the two stand as an ensemble, a duo of immense, inspired places of worship of world standing. The Ayasofya is the prototype, the most moving and uplifting of any; in the Blue Mosque the Roman basilica is transformed into an Islamic space and a sublime one, and the mascot of one empire newly drawn as that of a second. The various shades of blue in the stained glass (whence the unofficial name ’Blue Mosque’) add a paradisiacal tone; the large low windows either side of the niche, with their views of the blue Bosphorus, are like some divan poem of the garden of paradise; one cannot want for praise of God in this place. And in both places there is of course the great dome, thrown weightless far overhead by an ecstatic system of semi-domes, whose rows of high windows and sumptuously, though very differently decorated interiors give an appearance of flight, one imagines these heavenly rounds spinning. Again one is drawn to ask what the inspiration is. A lesser man walks into one of these buildings and feels a pressure build in his ribcage as something in him tries to expand, but he cannot put a name to it. A man of the calibre of Justinian or Sinan, backed by their respective imperial orders, feels that expansion and finds a dimensional expression.

No sooner had I entered the great courtyard of the mosque, with its shaded colonnades held up by slim pillars and arches, the wooden doors in its back walls that may or may not be more than ornamental, its fountain in the centre, than the call to prayer began. Tourists would not be admitted until the prayers were over, so they waited in the courtyard, enjoying the pale but still warm November sun. Megaphones were set up strategically to project the muezzin’s voice powerfully in all directions. A virtuoso singer, a high tenor voice - but still not as sweet as my local one in Nişantaşı, whose call to prayer is the most lyrical and full of yearning that I have yet heard. His phrases, Allahu akbar, Muhammedan rasullu-Llah and more, set on exquisite wavering lines of melody, such that a solo voice could be sustained in the outdoors - and before megaphones arrived. At that same moment the muezzin of a neighbouring mosque also began. Unlike elsewhere, however, where the multiple calls go on together in disarrayed disorder, these two took turns, an antiphonal effect brought off with great practice. As though one confirmed the assertions of the other. The muezzin of the Blue Mosque, with his megaphones trained on the courtyard, filled it with echoes. The other wafted from some distance away, just clearing the high walls. Later, when prayers had finished and the tourists were waiting to be let in through their special doorway, shuffling because the mosque’s keepers were taking their time, we could hear the muezzin again, unamplified, from within the building. He must have been practicing. I find a religion that invites prayer several times per day and reminds the people from the rooftops of the superiority of God an attractive one. Oddly, one of the megaphones, mounted so that it points upwards, reminded me with its trumpet-like mouth vaguely of a church bell swung to its fullest extent.

It was difficult for an untrained eye such as mine to estimate the age of the mosque. Unlike, say, an English church, or indeed the illustrious basilica across the way, it showed little trace of its five hundred years, save in the wear on the steps at the entrances, and that was less than might have been expected. Waiting in the courtyard, I was reminded of the Turkish mosque in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan that was given to the Turkmen by the Turkish nation as a gift following independence from the Soviet Union. It is modelled on Sinan’s designs, possibly specifically the Blue Mosque, and not very much smaller; however, it lacks the wonderful gardens and illustrious neighbours of the original, having been squeezed onto a block in a residential district scarcely twenty years ago and hemmed in by roads. There is the same style of cool courtyard and the same soaring interior with its dome and semi-domes; the same sublimely peaceful open interior space, a flat sea of carpet prostrated to the flood of incoming light and the music of the round decorated universes overhead. Again it was difficult to say for sure whether it had not stood there for centuries or had in fact been assembled with JCBs from a CAD drawing two decades ago, the latest descendent of the Ayasofya and far away. The best clue is the flagstones, which are barely worn; the mosque is said to be less visited than would be the case had not a couple of workmen died in accidents during its construction, which was very rapid. A friend and I had visited and were alone there; as we were leaving, a bearded imam came towards us with the most welcoming smile, delighted at our visit and our selam. And here, today, I was in the precinct of its progenitor.

I had gone last Sunday afternoon to Ayasofya. Was waylaid by a shoeshine man, the first of several who practiced dropping a brush 'by accident' in front of a foreigner, and as this was the first time I fell for it. As I extricated myself afterwards he told me that Ayasofya was closed on Sundays. When I said I doubted that all the tourists in town for the weekend were therefore content just to walk up and down the streets, happy for all the monuments on this iconic hill to be closed, he made no response. As soon as I could, when the sudden demands for money had been argued down to a level I could concede without the rip-off actually hurting me, I continued up the hill to the basilica which, of course, was open. It was however by now late in the afternoon and I would have only half an hour before it did close. Unlike the Blue Mosque, which is a working place of worship and for which no admission is charged, Ayasofya is in state hands as a museum (on the orders of Atatürk), its staff are thus employees and there is no pretence of anything other than a workplace, a paid-for service provided in a rather bureaucratic manner. Equally it has to handle thousands of gawking visitors such as myself every day.

All that fell away in front of the terracotta-red edifice of this patched-up, sprawling, magisterial 1500-year-old. Here is not the clean perfection of line of Sinan’s response opposite, at least not from outside, where buttresses have been added over the centuries, mainly following repairs after earthquake damage, and some details have a bleak, almost industrial look from without. Going in, there is an inkling, but a vivid one, of the grandeur of Roman imperial buildings, most of the rest of which across Europe have long been ruins. That this one still stands is testimony to what has happened here in the intervening centuries, its flagstones and steps worn round by feet that once trod here. Passing through an outer and an inner narthex - presumably vestibules, for taking off outer garments, for drawing the mind from the outside to the concentrated grandeur of the interior - one enters through tall portals the great space of the nave, taller than it is long, the dome, richly worked round with Arabic calligraphy in gold, seeming to float 51 metres above the floor - equivalent to the height of fifteen modern storeys. There is not the light in here of the Blue Mosque, it is gloomy enough to suggest the mystery of the ages rather than the crystal, Bosphorus-toned light of the divine immediacy. Mosaic is revealed here and there - the interior was once entirely lined with chunks of gleaming coloured stone, before suffering earthquakes, iconoclasts and a change of religion. And when that change came, it was famously decreed that the Christian mosaics should not be desecrated, merely covered, such that, centuries later, it has been possible to peel some of them back. Sinan, the Ottoman architect of the Süleymaniye and Sultanahmet mosques, and from that down to charitable bathhouses, added his touches to Justinian’s cathedral in the first of four minarets and various structural reinforcements. In this place, held in the freezeframe of a museum, an otherwise impossible idealism holds sway in which costly expressions of both Islam and Christianity stand together, distinct yet mixed, and the resulting total somehow greater than the sum of its parts, telling not of religious dogmas but of humanity’s reality both Christic and prophetic.

We were herded out by exasperated whistle-blowing wardens who wanted their tea, long before I had drunk my fill of the place. It had the feeling of a city in its own right, as though that sublime ensemble of dome and semidomes were superior to any sky in nature, its wide open floor a world big enough for all encounter and all transactions and all wonder to be contained, and the whole old enough to contain all time; I felt a compelling desire to dwell there and never leave. It is the big man who can dwell thus in the rest of our world.

Originally written 3 November 2007

It is my favourite way home, and it is so convenient, though rather slow: to take the boat from Eminönü to Üsküdar and change there back across to Besiktas. It spares the long dull walk, and the ghastly crowding of the tram and the unspeakable traffic snarls. Instead there is the deck, spacious even when full, a glass of sweet tea and the rocking brought on by waves, who knows what waves and where they are from. Still there is a sense of relief, coming home, to be back on the European side at Besiktaş or Kabataş. Though not wide - perhaps half a mile at this point - the Bosphorus is a chasm, uncrossable without help. It is deep, full of strong currents, and a totally uninhabitable place for man. It runs through a city - or, rather, a city has formed on its banks, enriched through it, taken to the world by it - but it is as remote from the city as any ocean. What if there were to be no more boats across? For sure, there is today a bridge; isolation is no longer absolute. Yet the bridge is distant and in its own way impassable except to machines. One might take a taxi from Üsküdar to Besiktaş but the fare would be astronomical. (One might add that this channel of water is a trite, symbolic division of the continents - after all, one could walk up the western shore, turn left and follow the Black Sea coast round until eventually returning to a point a few hundred yards from the start, on the opposite side. But even then there would have been a transition spelled out in the countries passed through - from Thrace and Bulgaria, definitely south-eastern Europe, Ukraine, geographically European and with culturally European claims, to the disquiet of its big brother; Russia, definable precisely by its schizophrenia as to whether it is fundamentally European or Asian; then Georgia, Christian but definitely Asian, along with Azerbaijan and Armenia, and at last Anatolia, the ancient Asia Minor.) Such abstrusions aside, if there were no boat there would be no option but to remain on the other shore, as though one had crossed a sea. And though in one sense Üsküdar is just another group of suburbs, in another equal sense it lies on a different continent, and this has a resonance. Just as one can feel wonder at having travelled from home to the city via Asia, in the course of an ordinary day. Just as one wonders at these boats, how everyday it all is, how cheap it is, how many competing lines there are, what a web of routes exists, these boats turning and approaching under each other’s bows, a relentless stream of commuters passing in each direction.

On the southern shore of the Golden Horn, just inside the Galata Bridge, lit up against the smoky night by rows of bare bulbs, two boats serve fried fish from large hobs. They rock from side to side so sharply - like a child’s round-bottomed toy that cannot be knocked over - one of the cooks practices keeping upright while the deck twists thirty degrees either way beneath him, but the fish don’t quite slide off the stove, nor the stove off the deck. Still, the man serving the fish to customers on the quay has to hold it out, waiting for his side of the boat to drop and bring him close enough to reach shore. I never do see what caused all this rocking, the inner Horn appearing seeming calm to the eye.

Drawing away, churning and scrabbling, from the lit-up shore, into the dark channel. The black waves seem bigger now, the Asian shore further away. We move out from the ancient city, its hills crowned by imperial mosques floodlit, but its bazaar streets now dark and empty but for wind. Odd lights move on the water, but don’t inform what they are. The colossal container vessels have but a headlight and a tail light, without much on board to indicate life; they pass through like dark bodies in deep space. It is astonishing a combination at any time, the historical city and its watery determinant, still today full of big ships - ships bigger than ever before. The Pera hill stands to port, the Galata Tower floodlit and, by the water, the Istanbul Modern gallery behind the cruise ships. Men on the upper deck sip tea and look out, never quite tired of the passage. It is like a licence to look to the horizons, as well as a forced removal from work or domesticity. Wordless, familiar, unacknowledged, it releases man to dreaming. To standing silently among strangers as this ritual of passage familiarly passes. By the Seraglio Point a thousand white lights pick out the traffic entering the city, lights that move closer and condense into a single line-mass as the road turns perpendicular to us. Beside them, the unearthly white of the lighthouse beam, rising and falling. Green buoys wink a sea lane to the world’s unseen ships past rocks and unlit offshore platforms. And seaward - black beyond blackness. Only last week, before the clocks changed, I had come this way in an autumnal afternoon, the water luminescent one way and jewel blue the other, so light that it seemed to have no weight. Meanwhile the great channel, the dark deep flow through the brilliant city, between the streets, under the land, that was there before the city and will be there after it has been. Ships steer across the void, their lights nodding; man cannot survive here, he must be carried in a vessel. They shift like stars, passing worlds on a black oscillating carrier.

This blog is an assemblage of bits of writing beginning in autumn 2007. Much of them have to do with a period of time spent in Istanbul and the experiences here; others are not directly related. Anybody who finds it is welcome to read it.

Throat is a throwaway name yet not without a certain sense. Istanbul stands astride a strait of sea, the Bosphorus, which in Turkish is Bogaz, which translates as Throat. Ships pass up and down this channel constantly, linking the Aegean via the Marmara to the Black Sea or vice versa. The strait separates Europe and Asia at this point. It is profound in the sense of being deep and covering a tectonic fault, but also for its rich human history - as well as its great physical beauty. Like an anatomical throat, it is a channel down which things pass in time, and has been the reason for the foundation of the city and its importance.
I do not neglect that anatomical sense either. Without a throat there is no voice. It is the shifting organ-pipe of the singer, the wind tunnel of the speaker (and, need it be added, the path to a man's stomach!).

There are strange winds blowing today, the climate is shifting fast, and we are moving with it. Perhaps something of that movement can be recorded here. Perhaps something of what remains can also be indicated.