Oscar
Even though I'd spent two nights in Mardin I still hadn't properly looked around. As usual recently, I woke at about seven and walked along streets that were slowly, tentatively coming alive. I went to a cafe near the town's statue of Ataturk, where I sought some caffeine before climbing to the castle.
Oscar, who helped me order and chatted with me in near to fluent English, lives in Marmaris on the west coast. There, he is a dancer in a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and spends alot of time, by his own account, collecting western friends, usually female. With his broad, shiny smile and extrovert playfulness he cuts in the context of party-happy-hedonism what I imagine must be the exact opposite figure to the one I do. So, a touch of envy traced the lineage of my thoughts as I watched this self-declared alpha male in action.
Sometimes I feel that if everyone was as sunny and blithe as people like Oscar, far too interested in having a good time to worry about 'important' things like religion and politics, the world might be admirable after all. Perhaps this is actually the unconscious creed of alot of young people who despair of history's grand narratives - that is when they have energy enough to pause from ther hedonistic strivings. The incontestable innocence collecting around a lot of mindless hedonism in a way can give one hope. One might imagine Palestinians and Israelis, high on ecstasy, recognising one another's beauty in the arms of tribal elysium.
All well and good of course - but can such a decoupling from the world of conceptual thought and its legacy of millenia of mental empires really work, really last, long term. One suspects not. The downside of this reaching for 'party heaven' which has shaped so much of our western post 50s culture, is the fact that it's rooted in a flight from reality, an unashamed spirit of abandon that refuses to let the recognition of its own escapism get in the way of its golden sentiments. The answer, as usual, is some kind of synthesis. While retaining the innocent breadth of spirit, that wide oceanic openess that crowned the sixties and can still be found - despite its abandonment of philosophical articulation - we should not consider 'square' or 'dull' or 'uncool', or whatever mindless moniker the 'radically hip' thought police now uses, the rich legacies of our ancestors' thought systems. We are rooted in their soil and it is fantastical posturing to suppose we can be real people cut off from them. Without any tradition at all - not even to converse with, there is no originality, there is only childish bunny shadows. What is the branch if disconnected from the tree. Happy maybe to be free of the tree - but dead nonetheless. T.S Eliot, moi?
Oscar is only in Mardin for a day to get a driving licence cheaper and easier than he would back home. He claimed to have a soldier friend who could maybe, if I wanted, let me into the castle on the hill. This castle, as I only then learnt, was hidden behind barbed wire - a part of a military compound. He also very kindly helped translate a speech for me I was thinking I might have to make to the Syrians when I next returned to the border: reminding them I was there yesterday, that they had photocopied my passport and that I was there to collect my visa. Pretty simple really. He gave me an insight into the elaborate nature of Turkish when what he wrote was almost twice as long as my version. To be fair though he did add some extra detail I thought wouldn't be necessary, just to be clear.
Gratefully declining Oscar's offer of a possible military escort, I climbed as high as the barbed wire would allow. Presumably this military compound is a hangover from the Kurdish-Turkish troubles which visited Mardin in the late 90s.
After strolling languidly down I explored the lively bazaar which uses donkeys to carry around the goods it sells. Buying my daily Turkih paper, alas for the last time, I headed off for my bus to the soon to be flooded town of Hasankeyf.
Oscar, who helped me order and chatted with me in near to fluent English, lives in Marmaris on the west coast. There, he is a dancer in a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and spends alot of time, by his own account, collecting western friends, usually female. With his broad, shiny smile and extrovert playfulness he cuts in the context of party-happy-hedonism what I imagine must be the exact opposite figure to the one I do. So, a touch of envy traced the lineage of my thoughts as I watched this self-declared alpha male in action.
Sometimes I feel that if everyone was as sunny and blithe as people like Oscar, far too interested in having a good time to worry about 'important' things like religion and politics, the world might be admirable after all. Perhaps this is actually the unconscious creed of alot of young people who despair of history's grand narratives - that is when they have energy enough to pause from ther hedonistic strivings. The incontestable innocence collecting around a lot of mindless hedonism in a way can give one hope. One might imagine Palestinians and Israelis, high on ecstasy, recognising one another's beauty in the arms of tribal elysium.
All well and good of course - but can such a decoupling from the world of conceptual thought and its legacy of millenia of mental empires really work, really last, long term. One suspects not. The downside of this reaching for 'party heaven' which has shaped so much of our western post 50s culture, is the fact that it's rooted in a flight from reality, an unashamed spirit of abandon that refuses to let the recognition of its own escapism get in the way of its golden sentiments. The answer, as usual, is some kind of synthesis. While retaining the innocent breadth of spirit, that wide oceanic openess that crowned the sixties and can still be found - despite its abandonment of philosophical articulation - we should not consider 'square' or 'dull' or 'uncool', or whatever mindless moniker the 'radically hip' thought police now uses, the rich legacies of our ancestors' thought systems. We are rooted in their soil and it is fantastical posturing to suppose we can be real people cut off from them. Without any tradition at all - not even to converse with, there is no originality, there is only childish bunny shadows. What is the branch if disconnected from the tree. Happy maybe to be free of the tree - but dead nonetheless. T.S Eliot, moi?
Oscar is only in Mardin for a day to get a driving licence cheaper and easier than he would back home. He claimed to have a soldier friend who could maybe, if I wanted, let me into the castle on the hill. This castle, as I only then learnt, was hidden behind barbed wire - a part of a military compound. He also very kindly helped translate a speech for me I was thinking I might have to make to the Syrians when I next returned to the border: reminding them I was there yesterday, that they had photocopied my passport and that I was there to collect my visa. Pretty simple really. He gave me an insight into the elaborate nature of Turkish when what he wrote was almost twice as long as my version. To be fair though he did add some extra detail I thought wouldn't be necessary, just to be clear.
Gratefully declining Oscar's offer of a possible military escort, I climbed as high as the barbed wire would allow. Presumably this military compound is a hangover from the Kurdish-Turkish troubles which visited Mardin in the late 90s.
After strolling languidly down I explored the lively bazaar which uses donkeys to carry around the goods it sells. Buying my daily Turkih paper, alas for the last time, I headed off for my bus to the soon to be flooded town of Hasankeyf.
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