What is Left but the Cleaving

With only two days to go before the girls and I head back home, my feelings are mixed and hard to convey.

E. E. Cummings (*) had a neat technique for expressing this kind of ambivalence and adding depth to his poetry. He would often pair a word with its antonym, or else a word with an oppositional connotation. The best example of this is probably "my father moved through dooms of love" in which he uses phrases like "haves of give," "depths of height," and the titular "dooms of love" to portray the mutability/multiplicity of both the man he is describing and his own opinion of/relationship to him. Cummings called this idea "knowing around," an awkward phrase that nonetheless hints at the three-dimensionality it evokes. He credited his discovery of it to modern art and reading Freud.

(* Sorry to be pedantic, but see here for why I don't use the lowercase when writing his name, which echoes what I learned doing research for the little book I edited/wrote about his work.) 

The most common expression of this kind of thing is probably the word "bittersweet," which Cummings might have coined if it didn't already exist. That's a good word, it conveys a lot, but it has become a little watered down by over usage. Much more interesting to me are those rare words that wield this great power in more subtle fashion--they don't just smash together two antonyms, they quietly embody their own opposites. And like two mirrors facing thus create a kaleidoscope of conceptual depth. The simultaneous slipperiness and density of meaning conveyed by these special words is rather ironically reflected in our inability to settle on a single term for them. Instead we have at least eight: autoantonym, contronym, antagonym, Janus word (after the Roman god), enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, or addad.

Some good examples include fast (moving quickly/fixed in place), refrain (non-action/repetition), weather (withstand/wear away), left (remaining/departed), and sanction (permit/punish). My favorite, however, is the word "cleave" which means both to cling and to split apart.

I found myself thinking about cleaving and contronyms as I sat down to conclude this little travel journal. Especially after I realized this time of year has always been bittersweet for me (teachers out there are nodding their heads and saying, tell me about it). In my youth the end of the school year meant both liberation and the loss of guidelines, brief excitement often followed by ennui and aimlessness, pride of accomplishment and fear of future. These contrary feelings took on even greater resonance at times of graduation. It was also around this time that Lizzie and I left Virginia on a cross country drive to start a new life in California. A year later, it was again when we drove back across the country to get married. Thereafter, it became the time we parted ways for the summer and she went abroad (a time of separation and loss, but also an annual reminder not to take each other for granted). Likewise it was when we moved to Connecticut, and then again to Virginia. After that I thought such periods of push-pull would only be reflected in the lives of my daughters. Except, here I am again, readying both to depart and return, to look ahead and behind, to consider what is left. To cleave.

Things I will miss:

The sunsets. Being able to see one every night is a special privilege. This was tonight's.

 The call to prayer. Until this year, for me, the adhan has always been an evocative song of Otherness, the clearest signal that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. A phrase from my book comes to mind--"the soundtrack to an Orientalist mind film." Although it is not as omnipresent here on a college campus as it is in the cities and villages, and though I remain devoutly irreligious, the call to prayer now triggers a different feeling, one more rooted in its actual purpose. To me it says, Stop what you are doing. Breathe. Give thanks. Be mindful.

The Phrygian Highlands. The Phrygian Highlands. The Phrygian Highlands.

The way thunderstorms roll over Ankara almost every afternoon in early summer. Storms have bookended our stay here, actually. There was an epic lightning storm the night we arrived. It lit up our new city like a carnival funhouse and made me instantly love the view from our apartment. Then we got a surprising amount of snow. But now it's all about the thunderstorms and their leviathan grumbling. I've always found this sound comforting for some reason. It makes me feel cozy, even when I am out in the rain. I didn't learn until moving to California that thunderstorms aren't common everywhere. They may not come as regularly, but I am thankful that Virginia always serves up some doozies.

When you are really lucky, you get a thunderstorm, the call to prayer and the Phrygian Highlands all at the same time. With such a triumvirate blessing your senses, it is easy to forgive your daughters for nearly spoiling your already windblown, amateur hour cinematography with their whiny voices.

I will also miss the use of certain phrases that plumb this country's deep well of graciousness and goodwill. I only know a few. Kolay gelsin, which means "may it come easy." You say it to your bus driver, the guy sweeping the street, or the women cleaning your hotel room. It conveys sincere empathy, especially with those who work the hardest for the least pay. I think this phrase should be universalized somehow. Afiyet olsun, "may it be good for you." This is said by someone serving you a meal they made themselves. To which you respond, Elenize sağlık, or "health to your hands." Hoş geldiniz is said whenever you enter an establishment or to someone arriving in a new place. It means "it is nice you are here." The response is hoş bulduk. "I find it nice (to be here)." Although I am ashamed of how little Turkish I've learned, I am glad to have learned these and I was proud to use them often.

A standard response would be to say the food. I do love the food here and  I will dearly miss certain dishes, especially döner kebabs, certain kinds of güveç, white cheeses, and man oh man the olives. But America has more variety. And much better beer.

Things I won't miss:

Being mute and powerless. Language is a tool you take for granted until you are stranded without it exactly when and where you need it most. I like tools. I like to be handy. Over here I am not handy. I am handicapped.

Living in an apartment building. Especially the journeyman guitarist who lives above us and played the same handful of blues riffs all year, at all hours, including right now, this very moment. And the woman who lives across from us, who often gets tired of her screaming children, so she pushes them out in the hallway and lets them roller blade back and forth, banging against my doorway for hours. Especially on days they have off, and I am trying to write.

Along the same lines, I certainly won't miss the military helicopters that are forever running mysterious sorties from some unseen base in yonder hills to an equally mysterious destination beyond our building. What are they doing? Why are they doing it all day long? Alas, I will never know, and maybe I ought to be reminded of the world's state of perpetual war but it sure spoils my concentration.  

Something small that will never be the same:

Honeysuckle. It's everywhere over here this time of year. It follows me as I walk to get the girls from school. It wafts up to our balcony from the big bush across the street. Back in Virginia, there is also a honeysuckle bush across the street from my house. For the rest of my life I will probably never smell it there without thinking about it here.

To Cleave or Not to Cleave. That is the question. Yes. No. Either. Neither. Both.

Lost and Found and Lost Again

On Day 5 we woke in Manisa. This sizeable city between Sardis and Izmir was known in classical times as Magnesia ad Sipylum (to distinguish it from the other Magnesia on the Maeander River). It is perhaps most famous as the site of the final battle in the Roman-Seleucid War. We were there to track down and if possible see in person another unique setting for my book: the Kybele Anıtı, a monolithic rock carving found halfway up Mount Sipylus. The night before we had pulled into town with a flat tire, but a nice fellow at our hotel helped us get that patched with relative ease, so we used the last of our daylight to seek out the Ağlayan Kaya or Weeping Rock/Niobe with which the Kybele Anıtı is often confused. Both are stone images of women drawn from myth, both were mentioned by Pausanias in his 2nd-century AD work Descriptions of Greece, and both have a familial connection with Tantalus, but the former is man made and the latter is natural. The Niobe is not that hard to find or reach, provided you don't mind driving Manisa's narrow back streets. She was the daughter of Tantalus, sibling to Pelops and Broteas. She weeps because all fourteen of her children--seven daughters and seven sons--were killed by Artemis and Apollo, respectively, as punishment for her boasting about her fecundity to the pair's mother, Leto. Whereupon she fled back to Mount Sipylus and was turned to stone, condemned to weep alone forever. Pretty grim. A public park and amphitheater now provide her with frequent company but both were empty when we arrived right at sunset, save a small klatch of shifty eyed young men sipping beer in paper bags. A few hundred yards away is a cool Roman bridge and nicely situated cafe that further insures Niobe never stays lost or alone for long.

The Kybele Anıtı is a different story. First off, she is a native Anatolian deity, not an imported Greek myth. Secondly, she is way way older. Nobody really knows how old exactly but a clay figurine found at Çatalhöyük (a Neolithic site in Central Turkey) which bears a striking resemblance to statues of her from the Classical period dates to the seventh millennium BC. Which puts her at the very dawn of history--twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids. The third thing that makes the Kybele Monument different from the Niobe Rock is that, nowadays at least, it is much much harder to reach. Strangely, this doesn't seem to have been the case in the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. While doing research for the book, I've read about a dozen early traveler reports and collected almost as many drawings and photos (see below for a little timeline I put together) that suggest it was a fairly regular stop on antiquarian tours of Asia Minor. Pausanias, who was born nearby, dubbed it the "most ancient of all the images of the Mother of the gods." Dutch-Levantine minister and missionary Henry Van Lennep had this to say about it in 1870: "We here look upon a monument which was even to Homer an object of venerable and unknown antiquity, a monument antecedent not only to history, but in some sense to mythology itself." Pioneering archaeologist, spy, stateswoman, confidant of kings and all around badass Gertrude Bell (about whom Werner Herzog just made a movie starring Nicole Kidman) visited the Kybele in 1902 and wrote this in a private letter: "She looks so old - her face indistinguishable, her body leaning forward over her knees - marred as she is I think she is still the most impressive figure I have seen since the Sphinx."

Greek legend attributes creation of the relief to Broteas, brother of Niobe. Current scholarship dates it to 1300 BC and credits the Hittites. Whatever the case, given that kind of pedigree and historical prominence, you'd think the site might warrant a modicum of attention or respect. I don't know, maybe a sign? Perhaps a parking lot. Something resembling a trail. I would have settled for a map. Instead, a podunk amusement park abuts the highway beneath the mountain and completely obscures the Kybele's existence. It's not there because the Kybele is there, it just happens to be there. I know this because neither the concierge at our hotel nor the lone fellow we found manning the gate of the park (closed for the winter) had any idea a 3,300-year-old work of art worthy of mention by Homer even existed in this town, let alone a thousand- odd feet overhead. I get such a kick out of this kind of cultural nonchalance. I'm not sure whether it can be better explained by the embarrassment of ancient riches in Turkey or just a fundamental disconnect with nature and history. Then again, maybe we're just weird. Yeah, that's probably it.

Kybele Anıtı , hiding in the jungle of underbrush.

I had scoured the Internet for some kind of trail map and the best I came up with was something from a website cataloging dubious proofs for Atlantis. I overlaid that on a Google Earth satellite image to get a sense of distance and terrain but forgot the damned thing at home. It probably wouldn't have helped anyway because the trail it marked simply did not exist, at least not when we were there. I found one other blog of a guy who had tried and failed twice to find it (kind of like my trials at Aizanoi). This guy is a minor personality in the field of fringe archaeology and I was determined to succeed in his wake, despite the fact that he had hired a guide and didn't have two eleven-year-olds attempting it with him. One paragraph from his blog is worth quoting: "Three hours later I had aborted the journey. I was shattered. I mean, devastatingly exhausted. My heart was pounding and I was physically incapable of continuing. Although I could see the Cybele relief a few hundred metres in the distance, for the life of me I could not reach it; the terrain was too inhospitable. Even if I had had a machete, I would have struggled to penetrate the brutal undergrowth."

That pretty well sums up the task at hand. Nothing worth doing is ever easy, though, right? Shortly after we plunged into the briars we lost our vantage on the relief and had little to no real sense of where it was or where we were going.  Surprise, surprise, we ended up way off track and didn't realize this until an hour later when I left Lizzie and the girls behind to do some reconnaissance. Scrambling straight up a rockfall, I finally broke through the trees and underbrush enough to get a bead on the Kybele and saw we had been heading in the wrong direction all along. I went back to retrieve the ladies and deliver the bad news. Then we doubled back up the way I had come. I thought getting out of the thicket at least would speed our progress but I had led us to a precarious spot where going on was just as dicey as trying to get back down. The girls were game, though, and so we went for it. The next hour was pretty white knuckle, with a lot of butt shimmying to keep from falling down a series of steep pitches with bad footing. We hit a few impassable crevasses and had to descend a bit and then regain our altitude but in due time we made it across.

After all that effort, seeing the Kybele up close and personal was an ambivalent experience. Her sheer size is humbling and perhaps explains her arrested state. She is not merely weathered, she is also stillborn. Maybe her anonymous sculptor just took on a bigger project than he or she could finish. Maybe fate had other plans. Then again, from a postmodern perspective, this nascent quality captures the act of creation, or birth, much better than something complete and wholly realized. In the book I describe her as looking like a cicada that died trying to shed its shell. From many angles she is more monstrosity than Great Mother, more golem than goddess, but like her stone sister Niobe a certain startling recognition snaps into place when you circle just so and you spot the all too human tension between stoicism and imperfection, strength and frailty. Her throne is a great many-colored thing, striated and moist. Signs of previous visitors were more abundant than I would have liked. Graffiti marred much of her lower surfaces, and some gonzo adrenaline junkies had left foot and hand loops in the thinnest climbing rope I have ever seen as an invitation to scale the cliff from which she had been carved. I stopped short of accepting and ate an apple instead. When our sweat had cooled and dried, and we lingered long enough for time to slip its tether, and the sun had crossed its bittersweet meridian and was throwing the shadow of Mt. Sipylus across the vast fertile plain below us, we bid the Kybele goodbye and began our descent. A wadi, or dry stream bed, made the first section much easier, for now we decided to head straight down until we hit the fence behind the abandoned amusement park and try to cheat the briars along its supporting wall. This strategy worked for the most part and before we knew it we were lifting the girls over a section of barbed wire and heading to the car. Before we left, I ran out onto the road and took one last look back at her, tucked into her aeonian alcove far above the passing world, and felt a childish thrill at the thought of how many times she had been and would yet be lost and found and lost again. May the way to her never be signed or mapped, and that parking lot never built.

 

Waystations Between

Day 3 of our road trip took us through territory that will feature prominently in the climax of my book, so I won't be writing anything about it here, other than to mention the Otel Dülgeroğlu (which isn't in the book, though it deserves to be). If you ever find yourself in Uşak, or traveling along the old Izmir-Ankara highway that bisects Western Turkey, I recommend a stay in this converted han/caravanserai. Rates are reasonable, staff is friendly and courteous, the rooms have gorgeous high ceilings and thick enough walls to inure against the noise of the bustling city, and the restaurant is excellent, if a wee bit overpriced. I'd advise against arriving at rush hour like we did, or trying to navigate any of the one way streets around it, but beyond that you can't go wrong. After our vehicular tribulation in Çavdarhisar, we couldn't have asked for a better place to rest up, lick our wounds, and pretend we were extras in a remake of Casablanca. Only we must have missed the memo about shooting being cancelled that day because the place was almost empty. Solitude seems to follow us like Pig Pen's cloud of dust, but for me it always brings a peace and quiet as comforting as Linus's blanket.

Day 4 brought us first to Alaşehir, the city built over ancient Philadelphia, which also features in the book. We weren't there very long. Earthquakes and fires have robbed much of its material history. But I had really come in the vain hope of finding some hip and enterprising young turk capitalizing on the sister-city thing by selling classic Dr. J t-shirts with a fez on his afro, or döner kebab hoagies, or even some sketchy dude selling simit (the Turkish soft pretzel) from a dirty grocery store cart instead of a pile atop his head--anything to make for a good photo or souvenir for my Philly obsessed family back home. Alas, the best I could do was summon the same sense of abject disappointment we reserve for our sports teams. 

There was nothing disappointing about Sardis, our next destination. For some strange reason, this site is seldom accorded the same attention or respect that Turkey's more famous archaeological destinations get, but that's actually a wonderful thing. Because it means you have a decent chance of finding it uninhabited and taking in its charms at your own pace, and in your own headspace. Lizzie did all her graduate school fieldwork there, mentored by the late Crawford Greenwalt, Jr., a legend in the field whose graciousness, gentility, and warmth even today, several years after his untimely death, seem to infuse the place with a numinous serenity and light. The ruins are extensive and awesome, so much so that I won't even bother trying to describe them. We saved the monumental Temple of Artemis for last, ate our lunch and spent hours alone there; I even took a nap. Suffice it to say that there may be other temples its equal in grandeur and beauty of surroundings but surely none surpass it. Earlier, while touring the well-preserved city street, synagogue, and gymnasium we were followed around by a handsome little pup and it took everything I had to resist the urge to bring it home. 

We had all been there before, even the girls. I actually spent several weeks babysitting them in the temple when they were four, and as cool as those times were, this visit will stand in my memory at least as the red letter day. For Lizzie that will likely be in two weeks, when she returns alone to see the Bilkent Orchestra perform in "Greenie's" honor, in the temple, a symphony that he commissioned. Heady stuff for a humble gal from Virginia. As we were leaving that day, it was especially touching to watch the recognition and joy wash over the site guard's face when he remembered Lizzie from her time working there, over a decade before. His wife was there as well, selling scarves and handmade purses, fruits, and nuts. She fawned over the girls and despite her obvious poverty, refused any payment for the items she wanted to give them. Turks may have a reputation for haggling, but trying to outbid their generosity is often just as difficult. We drove away waving as if from family we would dearly miss.

I had originally planned to include Day 5 in this post as well, but since it entails a self-contained adventure, with lots of backstory, I think I'll leave that for next time.  

Görüşürüz. (See you later.)