Resplendant Reflections/Roving Revistas

Arrivaderci, Istanbul

The following final entry for this travelblog (as it were) was material prepared for an article on "writers living in Istanbul" in POETS & WRITERS. As far as I know, the usual crowd is there, but my entry came in at the last trump and may not have been published at all. So I thought to publish it here.

Why did you move to Istanbul? Was it related to being a writer?

I moved to Istanbul partly on a whim and partly out of grim necessity: I needed a job, I had just gotten an academic degree where the rules of the game are that you have more of a chance of getting a job IF you already are working— "Istanbul?" I said to my friend, Ed Foster—poet, Talisman Press founder, and head of the Humanities department where I was adjunctiing—"but my field is Caribbean literature!" Furthermore, I had nearly finished my first novel, Beastly, set in Baltimore; and it had nearly nothing to do with anything east of the Chesapeake Bay or too much north of the Bight of Benin—

Istanbul? Turkey?

I asked Ed if I could think about it and went home. I thought. I figured. Why not? If nothing else, it would be another adventure, grist for my creative mill, I told myself; and I called Ed with my assent.

A day job, when you are any kind of emerging artist after all, is a precious thing.

How has living in Istanbul, or Turkey in general, affected you as a writer? What influence does the city exert on your work?

I came from New York, a big complicated city, to Istanbul, an even bigger, arguably more complicated one. In that regard, the New York experience did help prepare me for Istanbul. I certainly can't imagine coming to Istanbul from a red state, though I suppose red-staters might not even consider coming here in the first place. In fact, red state or no, I notice most folks in the U.S. haven't the foggiest notion of what Turkey is like, let alone having much in the way of factual information about it. So I decided to embrace my ignorance and determined to be positive and to go with an open mind.

Let's face it, though: Istanbul. Constantinople. I have a feeling that many folks from the U.S. have a mental picture of these places as a fairyland of minarets, domes and people running around in curly-toed shoes. I confess, when I was first taken by a student and her mother to the SultanAhmet area where the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque are located—when we emerged on that grey

February day to see the snow sifting down and the worn red brick of those
buildings, it felt very much like that vision.

I keep off and on again journals, as the natural thing seemed to be to record my observations and feelings about being here and about what I thought I saw—that petered out when I realized I was no longer a long-term tourist, but an ex-pat.

I flung myself into my teaching during the day, and my fiction at night. I met a few Turkish intellectuals; I met other writers. John Ash, the British poet became a good friend. I was shocked at the Turkish private university system—at least at the first one I taught in, full of over-indulged and poorly prepared students whom I was not supposed to fail, no matter how badly they performed. I clashed with that school's administration. I changed schools and, the students were still over-indulged, but there were some who were better, many who were a lot nicer, but the no-fail policy was still in effect and the steps towards better education slow. I became part of a writing group, a nest of ex-pat writers, mostly poets; I continued to meet some more interesting writers, usually Turkish, and more Turkish intellectuals.

When the day job turned sour, my refuge was—as it has often been in times of stress—my fiction. There I struggled with how to make sense of my experiences: what was this frustrating place, this fascinating place, that I was in? What was the metaphor that would guide me in making sense of it? That question is what ultimately drove me into an epistolary novel, Letters from Hell, beginning in Istanbul and centered on impossibly conjoined twins, of quite different points of view. They are currently about to travel into the peripheries of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire—I, as their creator, following them, still trying to understand this unique and layered place that I somehow landed in. James Wilde, a retired journalist here, gave a snort when he heard me read from it and commented, "Well, I am not sure the Turks will like you describing Istanbul as hell." I protest. In fact, that is not the location of my inferno; but that's another story.

In terms of the type of writing that I do: while I find contemporary Turkish poetry one of the under sung poetic traditions in the world (and I hope that changes—soon), I gave up poetry the minute I got an MFA in writing it. I wrote maybe two rather dreadful poems when I first arrived here—both during snowstorms. Presently I write in a fabulist genre, a fantastical one, if you will, and I think living in Istanbul did not so much change my way of writing as it intensified it: if civilization began in Anatolia when human beings settled down and farmed for the first time, and if I was witness to one of the oldest continuously inhabited metropolises on the planet, this place had to be a palimpsest of all the triumphs sorrows and inconsistencies of human beings' attempt to live on the planet. The music here is achingly sorrowful; the calls to prayer, among the most haunting, yearning for communion with the Divine—how does one write about all that in the dreary tone of a social realist? I believe you cannot. I guess, then, that you could say that Istanbul only encouraged me, for better or worse, to continue my writing as before and encouraged me to refine my craft.

The hardest thing about living in Istanbul was that I found many—not all—of my fellow ex-pats living like flies in amber, caught in the last time they participated in their own national culture, being virtual Rip van Winkles who had not kept up with the creative and intellectual movements of the times, often not even being open to them, "orientalizing," even, this Istanbul culture they had been living in. They drank too much, they created the world/the house/the academic department/the business they could never have created at home, all they while trashing their hosts who made such endeavors possible.

Among those in the writing group—mostly poets, all male, all ex-pat—their relationships, I found, were fraught with more petty gossip and catfights than a ladies sewing circle. That, quite frankly, wore thin and wasn't very inspiring.

Have you come in contact with other writers whose work is similarly affected?

One of my dear Turkish friends (and a brilliant translator), Önder Otçu, once said that "Istanbul is the place where you break your heart, so you stay." The line about being in a complicated city I stole from John Ash, who is both an ardent Byzantinophile, Turkophile, and Istanbul-o-phile. Most writers that have interested me here, however, are either bound to the place for life by choice or by birth. I haven't met any artists who have chosen to leave, as I will soon be doing. Finishing the new novel will give me a chance to reflect on this further.

Can you identify a common strain running through your work?

My own work is very much about people who do live on the fringes, as do exiles, ex-pats and most foreigners in not only Istanbul, but in many other elsewheres. I am fascinated by twins, by freaks, by enacting the impossible in order to understand the possible, by astonishment in general.

How has the experience of not being around your first language affected your writing?

Of all the places I have spent time in outside the U.S., I found Istanbul the most challenging. The language, for someone whose other languages are all Latin-based, is extremely difficult to learn (and, conversely, I admire my students for their facility with my mother tongue.) In the long run, only if you are prepared to marry a Turk, raise children and grandchildren as Turks, and become an immigrant, can you become more a part of this scene. Just being an "ex-pat," a voluntary exile, with minimal command of the language, leaves you on the periphery, making silly generalizations about the people you live with and building even sillier sand castles on other people's shores. Ultimately, I believe you have to go back home—at least once—in order to decide who you are and where you want to belong. And that return is almost never the fault of your hosts, but more the need to reexamine oneself, one's place in the world, and one's work.

Thus, I got to the point where I realized that I must either learn Turkish for real, or leave. The wall of incomprehension was a terrible barrier, as I depend upon talking to ordinary people—cab drivers, waiters, shop-keepers, people I meet in coffee houses—to get a sense of my environment, to learn.

Not being around my first language had certain benefits, however, like going to a lovely country retreat to finish that novel, that book, etc. without having to interact, to dole out social niceties when all you really wanted to do was work. It is the ultimate sense of privacy for a writer.

What is your interaction with Turkish literature or Turkish writers--the Turkish/Istanbul literary community--and how has that affected your work?

I have read and still read everything I could and can get my hands on by Turkish writers that has been translated into English. The most frustrating was to read bad translations, of which, alas, there are legion. All I can say is that translation should be a team effort—working with a "pony," a literal translation, developed by a native speaker and then a writer—not merely a translator—
rendering that into a writerly version of the original. I would love to have been engaged in that kind of project, but did not have the opportunity.

I have, on the other hand, ploughed though dreadful translations just because I wanted to read a particular author—Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute was one such novel. While I find Pamuk interesting and, at times, absorbing, I was one who was sorry that Yashur Kemal did not get the Nobel, as he has more of a corpus over time than Pamuk. New writing in Turkish is quite exciting and I hope to read more; but I can't say that has affected my work so much as legitimized my persisting in it. A region's fiction, I still believe, is far better than a textbook if you want to learn about someone else's world: one senses a community in fiction's pages—its generosity and its tolerance—and you feel a comradeship with the authors, despite your work perhaps being quite different from theirs.

Anything that sustains the human imagination, I believe, is vital in these times. Turkey, in its mélange of east and west, its history, its position in the world, has much to teach glib writers of the west. Ultimately, I am glad to have had to opportunity to practice my writing in this beautiful and complicated city.

The surfaces of things...

Thank you for continuing to add to the photo album.

Why is it that Miletus seemed so desolate? It wasn't in a more ruinous state than the other sites; but it seemed sadder somehow. Perhaps it was because the site was so flat & exposed.

I don't know; but the amphitheater is certainly impressive enough. And that glowing wash of light that lit up all the white-washed surfaces as soon as we were driving beside the sea- I don't know how one captures that.

& what beautiful stonecutters' work at Didyma. I'm glad you got closeups of the bases of the columns with those precise & delicate egg & dart & palmetto patterns.

It gives me an aching feeling to see such beautiful craftmanship. I also am reminded of my grandfather & what a meticulous craftsman he was (as were so many men of his generation.) I can look back & see us working together & how he kept one eye on me & would always catch me out when I hammered a nail in crooked & would stop me & make me pull the nail out & hammer it in "true."

Not that I appreciated the lesson I was learning then.

Love,

D.

Reading this letter from my friend, David, I think of the Neruda statement, as translated by D. Maloney (I have it in Windows that Open Inward: Images of Chile:

"It is worthwhile, at certain hours of the day or night, to look closely at objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with thier enormous loads of corps or ore, sacks from coal, barrels, baskets, the handles and hafts of carpenters' tools. The contact that these objects have had with the earth serve as a text for all tormented poets. The worn surfaces of things, the wear that hands give to them the air, sometimes tragic, sometimes pathetic, emanating from these objects lends and attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be scorned."

Through new eyes--letter from the returnéd D.

Have finally got to a computer- at the UD library. A beautiful cool, dry, spring day here, the air reminding me of the air up in the hills at the village of Sirenge; [Şirince], only my ears don't pop to get here & there are no orange trees blossoming & bearing fruit, with or without goats tethered to them.

I keep seeing people I know & I try to say to them, with as little swank as possible, that I've just got back from Istanbul. & as I try to summarize my journey & all its experiences into a few sentences, I find I am feeling the rush through me of whole days, the boat ride out to the second smaller of the Prince's Islands; the hours of wandering through the Sultanahmet area, waving away the hustling guides: my friend, my friend, where did you get your hat? It is a very unique hat; the ordinary repeated actions & sights, trudging uphill & pausing for breath, but also stopping to watch the children play in the narrow street or women spreading out on a flat roof the innards of matresses or the solitary old men sitting curled up on little chairs close to the buildings, staring at ?, as still as statues & no movement around them except for the smoke curling around their faces or the young aproned waiters rushing down the street balancing trays of the little tulip glasses of çay...

& since I can't say all this, I say: I feel as if I have been taken out of myself, such a different world, so many contrasts, contradictions, richness & shabbiness, loving attention to details like public flower plantings & bags of garbage tossed into street corners, the politeness, the formality of the people, the public affection among families & between friends... & if people's eyes don't glaze open I may go on with a little story, hearing the last call to prayer from your balcony window & feeling as if I were standing in rolling tides of words, the magic of that experience & then the old woman, the retired school teacher in Selcuk, who gave us tea & directions & who sat under a big poster of Kemal Ataturk & said to me when I spoke of the magic of the last call to prayer- good magic or bad magic?

So now I have the train horns sounding in the quiet of the night, each one a different note. No problem returning despite my anxiety about something going wrong. I didn't even have to take off my boots once.

Hope you have got your new refrigerator & that your phone interview went well.

I am now going to trot back up the green & now empty Mall. Such a relief to be able to walk in something else besides my 7 league boots. When I first stepped down the stairs in shoes, I felt like winged Hermes.

By the way, is it possible to get an attachment from Kodak of all the photos you took? It would be wonderful to have something esle besides postcards to look at.

D.

Şirince

21 Nisan 2007

Where to begin? Showing the views of Cihangir to my visiting friend, Anya? the visit to Burgazada (the island) with her?

Walking around with the unredeemably bitchy and alcoholic Ash through Balat, negotiating for Anya in my very limited Turkish, then sending her off on her own adventure here? To stay at the Buyuk Londra, once a haven for eccentric artsy types, with coughing parrot and a vast collection of ceramic coal stoves; now an attraction of same for the bourgeoisie who would like to appear more adventurous than they really are— ? One must have one's own adventure, or experience, here; but if anyone should stay, it should be she.

The unfolding melodrama of the mediocre people who reign in the academic realm where I teach and tutor, with no relation to either skills or training?

The visit of one of my oldest friends, David—a sleepy arrival, an extraordinarily early flight, with minor glitches we drive off in a rental car to a tiny village in the mountains

an "old Greek village" whose history it might be sad to know, but whose setting is so soothingly beautiful—stone paved roads, stone houses and outdoor divans with soft cushions, a wild figure on horseback riding through the village like a warrior separated from his cohorts,

...a crowd of goats momentarily engulfing me, then heading stubbornly home?

Silence...

Silence, or K'un the Abysmal, as the I Ching calls it. The period of darkness, like the seed underground which by some miracle grows, gestates, and finally emerges. It has been a difficult year, the odd academic calendar marked by semesters, straddling of the Western calendar year of 2006 - 2007 in this case, marred by the utter snakepittedness of the work environs in which I must move. Most of the serpents are fellow ex-pats. I call it a silence, not because it has been peaceful, but because I have quite frankly withdrawn from my work, in particular, and given myself over to mulling, to rage--yes, I admit it--to surviving the onslaught of my pettier, disparaging colleagues. It is a period of gestation, yes; it is a cocoon, though a very odd one at that.

It will take a long time to sort out the "Turkish experience--" if only I could have had the luxury of being a tourist, for even a brief time, as when employed here and unable to determine much regarding the conditions of one's labor, that "experience" does not provide the same insights. I am reminded of all the travel literature I have read: the authors are always passing through, touching down briefly, just visiting. Not I, said little Robin Redbreast. Somewhere in the vastness of the frenetic silence, especially these last six or seven months, I have felt as though I have moved from visitor to quasi-something else: to be a genuine ex-pat would require more determination to stay away, more jadedness. Or, as my colleagues, more inertia swathed in the excuses of distaste for their native lands.

I have seen so much since the onset of this quietude: Budapest, and more of Budapest, a quite liveable, luxuriously small city with eating habits so terrible that the men all drop dead at a mere 56 years old and a public transportation system so clean you really could almost eat off the floors of the metros. It and a dear young friend, a former flatmate, have been a refuge. The fact of it's recent parturation from its satellite state to a long celebration, a wha-hoo of consumerism and diners out, good wine, coffees... The graciousness of its architecture, the green of its parks...

Slovakia where I presented a paper, like a good little academic: a lovely little university town, though sad, sovietesque, with a downtown full of the ghosts of all its Jewish citizens, sent off to the camps. Roma on the edges of town, still dispised.

Northern Cyprus, full of wildflowers when I went there to visit an old colleague and his family, a peninsula stretching out into the sea with little villages and ancient ruins, and the sea, the sea, the sea... it was actually quite haunting and restful at the same time. I never got to the Greek side, but do not feel at all deprived.

The lunar year

It is Ramazan again. You hear the complaints of ex-pat friends regarding the drums in the wee small hours of the night, that awake them as well as awaking the faithful to their first predawn meal before the daily fast. The Gene Krupa-esque enegy of the drummers pounding on that sheepskin intrudes into the oud music coming over the earphones from your computer: you are comforted by the sound, the raw adolescent voices of the drummers and his companions chanting what-you-do-not-comprehend to rouse the observant in this neighborhood; for they are apparently forbidden to do so in more "modern," upscale areas. Going out on your small balcony overlooking the street, you see a slightly older man--oddly akin to a scout leader--exhorting the younger drummers to do their work carefully, properly. Somehow that only makes the efforts of these folk seem more caring, more human. It is their important time, not yours, and you must respect it.

Sisyphus

I must concede that to keep up in these months has become impossible. Pointless, in fact. The tug of home--friends, my dear friend D. and his reflections staying home in an unforgiving and uncharitable place (as "home" has become, it seems), my family--that tug overwhelms at times. Travel as titillation-- it feels as thorugh there are other things to do besides remark upon that which is unfamiliar and therefore noteworthy (but only to those for whom whatever "that" is is also unfamiliar.)

I mean no disrespect when I put up the photo in this section. I was horrified to read of the hamals of Ottoman times and to see an old photo of one with his wicker contraption on his back--it looks like a backpack but enables the person wearing it to balance incredibly heavy loads on their back. One becomes a human draft animal. They still do it, and I am reminded of some of my Turkish friends' complaints that for the poor of their nation, not much has changed. We with our angst would do well to remember that others' burdens are often more tangible and no less humiliating or painful.

June 12

Dear D.

I sent that CD via my aunt. Hope it gets there this time.

Anything new?

Love,

D. responds:

Yes, I did. It came Friday or Saturday. Thanks....

Hope you are enjoying your visit. & that you've had time to visit outside the family circle. Though there is much to be said FOR the family. When I was having such a hard time finding work & trying to make ends meet a few years ago, when my little nest egg...got swept away, it was my sister & her daughters who brought me food without my even asking, & these are working people, who are struggling themselves.

How does that one line from Frost's Hired Man go: Home is where you go & they have to take you in. & the wife says: I always thought it was what you didn't have to deserve. & they sit on the back porch talking while the stars come out, remembering the hired man when he used to work for them, how he always tossed the hay from the field onto the wagon to just where it needed to go, how he argued all summer with a summer worker, a college student, trying to talk sense into him, how he has a rich brother to take care of him but he'll never go to his brother & ask for help... & then the wife gets up to check on the old man & comes back to say he has died in his sleep...

Family is where you can go & they will love you & open their arms to you... I still believe this, yet at the same time I can look back & see what I saw a long time ago- how alone we can be & often are (though I did not & do not accept the vision of the extreme left or right that we are essentially rootless, disconnected atoms or laissez faire individualists).

But, I look around me here & now in America in the beginning of the 21st century & I feel that the connections that hold us together as family, community, society have begun to fray dangerously thin. I think these frayed-thin connections account to a large extent for our dysfunctional behaviors, including the lying.

O my, & here it is Monday again. What's the rest of the week going to be like?

Love,

D.

D., E. and B., June 20

June 20

Dear D.,

Well, I have returned to the internet. What that means is I can call using SKYPE again, so I will try.
I got a note from the agent saying that she thinks it's great and that she gave it to another reader--I
assume at the agency--and she thought it was great, found a few places she couldn't follow and would I be open to some editorial suggestions.

Of course I said yes.

It is heating up again. My hot peppers are blooming, as are the tomatoes, and I mix purple basil--also
from my back balcony "garden" in with my salads.
The cilantro is coming up. Every city apt. should
have a balcony.

Good luck on the grants.

Squawk soon!

Love,

B.

From E. regarding news from agent in London:

Dear B. -- absolutely. That's great news. Very exciting. Let them make their editorial suggestions and see how they feel to you. Which agent is this?

xoxox, E.

Dear E.

She is the British agent I told you about, with_________ agency in London.

Oh cross toes! My internet was down and my reply was delayed, but I am sure that's not a problem. Turkish technology--refridgerators, stoves, and now, a new wireless modem, are very good; but if they don't stop digging holes in the street... My other friend on this street had similar problems.

Btw, I am now reading DIVIDED--really enjoying it and the language.

Ta-ta,

June 20

Dear B,

Sorry to have missed your call this weekend- yesterday? Were you calling from Istanbul again? I can't remember now how long you were going to be in the States.

A long weekend for me as it started on Friday, since I took Friday off. I did a few things I had to do, get to Pathmark for fresh produce & to Dollar Value for milk & eggs & laundry detergent & canned goods & gumout (for my poor little pickup truck that has begun to shudder & stall when i shift down to 2nd gear which means I have to drive in low gear with my heel perpetually on the gas.)

What is freshest in my mind is going down to the outdoor pool to swim laps & the sunlight flashing on the water, burning spangles rocking, hard to look at, as the wind skimmed over the water & then the streamers of light dancing & looping on the bottom of the pool as I swam. If I believed in other lives, I could easily believe that I was once a dolphin.

What I don't want to remember is stopping by the Stavrakis' house on Elkton Road to catch up with C. & to see the old ones- he is 89 & she is 88. Unfortunately, Dr. S. fell & broke some bones a few months ago & is still recovering... C. is visiting to try to get help for them because they refuse to go into a--what are those places called where the nurses & aides are relentlessly cheerful & barge in on you to make sure you are taking your medication & if you can't manage to fix food for yourself in your kitchenette, you are herded into the cafeteria where you are not allowed to have wine with your meals & you are always surrounded by defeated, failing creatures like yourself who are all standing or leaning on walkers or sitting in wheelchairs on the threshold of darkness...

Of course, they don't want to go. So C. has to work out how to get help for them without them being made to feel- helpless (& they are going to resist being 'taken care of'' because they both have their wits about them & are still as fierce as when they began their hegira during the war, fleeing the Ukraine & the Stalinists, then Greece & having to flee the Germans & then Lisbon, fleeing the Fascists...). At the same time, she is having to deal with her youngest daughter, K., who is 21 & who has dropped out of school after 2 years & has recently been diagnosed as bi-polar & whom C. has brought with her from Portland & whom she is watching over as if K. is a glass figurine.

I know C. is frustrated & exhausted but after being around her for awhile, (enduring her constantly interrupting our conversation in the living room while K. was in the kitchen with a guy she met at a folk festival by calling out: K., what are you doing? K., are you all right? I began to feel that I was being overwhelmed by a fog of--despair? a miasma coming from poor C. She only mentioned her husband, once. I wanted to ask, why couldn't K. have stayed with him in Portland? That's her home, that's where her friends are. Whatever resources she knows are there. But I didn't.

At one point we were sitting out in the kitchen & K. & her guest were talking about Joan Baez' music & C. asked her to sing. She chose Diamonds & Rust & accompanied herself on the guitar. What a lovely voice & how well she played. All the stiffness & awkwardness & defensiveness fell away as her voice rang so true.

O dear, I thought to myself afterwards on the way home. How fortunate I was in my 20's that my family could not afford to send me to a hospital for "treatment" & that I was never labeled by an "expert" & had "medication" forced on me. I was fortunate to have a job (which I hated, at Tidewater Oil Refinery) but it made me get up in the morning & drive down to Delaware City from Arden & stop in Wilmington on the way back & swim laps at the Y & then stop at the Wilmington Library to rummage through the stacks & bring home one by one all the Bolligen series on Jung (whom I can't read anymore but he saved my life then) & stay up all night writing ballads & sonnets & imitations of Eliot & Frost & H.D. & listening to WFLN or WMMR... & then the next morning scribbling down my dreams (which never opened any magic doors for me) & reciting mantras all day in the Lab (did I ever tell you how I was visited by a revelation once as I was driving up Route 13 in my white Ford Galaxy?)

How fortunate I was to have been able to make my own way, even as I teetered along the edge as I did from time to time (I know sometimes people fall over the edge & can't come back by themselves & need care, hospitalization, even drugs- I am thinking of Pat.) But, I do believe that whatever "condition" a person is said to have, that this condition grows out of this person's life. (It isn't just genes or chemicals.) & I can't help but wonder how much K.'s loss of control & self-destructiveness reflects the miasma of her mother & what I know of her father's states of depression.

O well. Here I am on a Monday morning feeling - pugnacious, if you can believe that. We shall see what happens with the grant proposal.

Love,

D.

June 21

Dear David,

Strange, your letters are the only thing that makes me wistful about my home town. It's odd, and I haven't figured it out yet, how some of us wrench ourselves away out of a sense of duty (yes, DUTY). One should "move on"--not only that you might feel that one's home is too limiting, too unappreciative, too this, too that--one has to go out and seek one's fortune. But I also remember the smell of honeysuckle in the humid evenings of summer, the sudden thunderstorms when I had been picking blackberries off the side of the road, the funny little places that no longer exist where we hung out or had a party, the genuinely mean gossip and intolerance... I remember thinking, as the gossip burgeoned, well, if I don't get out of here, I'll become a local character and my kid will have some constipated, bourgeois English teacher at N. High look down their nose and say, "Oh, yes, I had your mother..." I was driving down the Fall Line, that little (or so it now seems) bump in the road that divides the flat part of town from the hillier and snootier part. I was almost 40. At that point I knew it--I had aready fled.

The other part was that it took that long to get the courage to leave home. I don't know if you knew that when I was a teenager, I was agoraphobic—genuinely afraid to go out alone--and I suspect that came from that terrible accident that I was in as a child that killed my father and left me in the care of my poor,inadequate mother.

I almost had to burn bridges to get myself out of there.

Now I am still afraid--I don't like flying--but I want to go places and see things, so I go anyway. I will say that (I hope) I have learned something from going out into the world, though I feel a bit like Narcissus of Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund--tired, no weary, after traveling so much. When I was back, I relished New York--it still feels more home than anywhere I have lived, though I can't possibly afford to live there anymore.

I feel for C., O.'s younger sister. People blame the parents for everything and when you have a child who suddenly turns into a stranger, I guess you want to blame it on their "teenagedness"--but they get weirder and weirder. What did you do wrong? Sometimes nothing, except that the strain of knowing how to cope with this person is something NOTHING prepared you for. One of my then a teenager's friends had a kind of psychotic break on a camping trip--saw things that weren't there, etc. Understandably he was terrified. He was a wonderful kid, who was very artistic, played music, bright, nice supportive parents, and he was about to go to a school of the arts for his last two years before college--very excited about it etc. But instead, he wound up on medication and at home. I asked him later if the medicine helped. "Well sort of," he said. "But I still see things."

Maybe C.'s miasma is the shock of seeing everthing crumble around her--she sounds stunned. Parents getting old, kid going crazy, maybe the marriage breaking up. I might feel a little overwhelmed. Her brother..., No help from the big sister, off in Belize or whereever... Thank goodness that child has music.

I have come to my Waterloo. I am no longer a tourist, but an expatriate. I am still dealing with this discomfiting state of affairs, and I really want to tell my gringo superiors (only in terms of their
jobs are they "above" me)--I really want to tell them what they can do with their crumbs that they throw me. Being who and what they are, they will probably not understand my lack of gratitude.

Spent this eve helping friends with a grant for refugees. That, at least, seems real.

Love,

B.

June 27

Dear B.,

Once again, I am glad that I was home when you called & that you called. It had been raining off & on all weekend & has rained off & on since. Does Istanbul get torrential rains & then turn hot & sticky & breathless afterwards?

When you called I had been out resting. The night before I had been out at Panera's trying to write & drinking the free refills & when I was coming home I heard popping noises to the south & looked down Haines Street & got a view of the fireworks going off down at the stadium, celebrating the Blue & Gold football game ( the charity event for retarded people played by D. high school seniors) & I found myself thinking of drying off in the outdoor pool locker room after only being able to swim 2 laps because the lifeguard herded everyone out of the water- thunder had been heard- & I remembered being annoyed by the old father (looking more like a grandfather) jollying along his Downs syndrome son, the fathers's infantilism seeming to encourage the son's maniacal cackling... & I remembered being annoyed- no, to be honest- put off, disdainful of the son's uncontrollable braying... & all of a sudden as I stood on Main Street & watched the flowering of the distant fireworks, I remembered hearing the jagged, tearing little cry at the end of the son's laughter... & I remembered suddenly feeling ashamed that it took so long for compassion to wake in my heart.

I remembered my mother who used to teach retarded adults telling me once when we were having one of out arguments, this one about abortion & this was when I was in my early 20's & feeling very self-righteous about the sanctity of life (not for any formally religous reason, I just thought at the time that all life was sacred) & my mother said, you don't know what it's like to teach the people I teach. Many of them are like children & they will always be able to be happy like children; but there are the one's who are intelligent enough to know that they are shut out from the world & they don't know how to get in & feeling shut out eats away at them & there is nothing I can do about it except love them & I can't love them enough to make up for them being shut out. They should never have been born.

My mother rarely made pronouncements, but when she did she didn't leave much room for any yes, but's.

I stood on the sidewalk & watched the firework explosions fill the night sky with blossoms & sprays of fire. Such a simple thing, fire blossoming in the air, but it captivates me. I thought of that young man laughing over his cry, his father's easy, patient voice, my mother's fierceness, the long ago purity of my "embrace" of life, of love--& of not being able to love enough... & I wanted to howl until someone would come & hold me...

& now here I am getting weepy sitting at the computer (fortunately no one is in yet) & I have to start clearing out my desk & going through the files & throwing out stuff & deciding what, if anything, I'll keep- I'm to meet with Skip of the Methodist Action Program this morning about writing grants for MAP... Ah well,

Take care,

Love,

D

July 6 –having sent him some links for teaching abroad, D. replies-

Ah, Florence, Madrid... much better. I will have to read this over carefully too. & take notes. I haven't found out yet how to get the UD printer to print more of the email than what shows on the screen. This looks really intriguing.

Just a quick synopses of my current situation. I ended my placement at the City on June 30th. The Director had made some mention of the possibility of an extension for me to come in on a part-time basis for July & August to work on sending out grants & to keep the City Mentoring Initiative going & then the day we were supposed to meet she didn't come into work & thereafter did not respond to any of my emails... The Deputy Director took me aside on Friday & seemed upset & embarassed & frustrated but was not going to broach protocol by saying what he seemed to be thinking. Before I left, I was given a surprize party by the whole Department- pastries, juice, fresh fruit & a card everyone signed & a present- a duffel bag. Everyone was there (& looking saddened) except for-- the Director.

Then yesterday I went over to the ELI classrooms located at Rodney dorm for the Tutor Prep session & lo & behold my initials were not on the schedule. When I asked why, in all innocence, thinking my initials had been put down wrong, I was told I was one of 6 people who couldn't be hired because the 500 Korean students who were coming this session cancelled (the Director was supposed to have let us all know but he waited until after the 30th, at which point my City email was no longer operative. I felt like I had been kicked in the teeth.

So, I have been resting ever since & trying not to panic. (I have told you how exhausted I've become, my legs rocking in the late afternoon as I took the elevator.) I am getting the Social Security benefits. I do have private tutoring at the Town Library in the evenings. But, I do need some kind of steady work.

I will reread both your websites.

I hope you are not gnashing your teeth too frequently because of your "superiors." I have always thought you find that people can be dicks at any level of society. The thing about people with any power is they get to be dicks exponentially. (My dictum for the day, as it were.)

Love,

D.

July 6

S--! That sucks. I don't know if you can get this as you mentioned something about your city email. However, don't forget that they owe you those courses, and build in a little budget which will allow you to buy a laptop, books, and pay for transportation (miscellaneous is a great catch-all). Anything you can get!

If you need to get a new email, I recommend yahoo—or gmail. But let's not lose contact via some form of transport. Actually some of those places like Macedonia--do not sneer. The living expenses are low and the EU is pouring money into places like that to help upgrade their educational systems.

I will call as soon as I can When are you around?

Love,

B.

July 15, from D.

Have finally made it down here to check on my email. I am home usually between 5 & 7 pm- to eat & then I take a bag of old journals & books of poetry & go to Main Street & choose either Panera Bread or Starbucks, whichever place has an empty table out front. I prefer Starbucks for all its being a chain as the people who run it know what they are doing & are friendly & are real people.

Am reading Yannis Ritsos again. Came across him in the 60's when I started reading all the contemporary Greek poets I could get my hands on after coming upon the selected works of Seferis. Have you ever read his diaries started when he was in exile during WW II? It's one of those books that is out of print like Sylvia Townsend Warner's Letters that I would dearly love to have.

I must keep going with my email catching up as this is my first stop here since the beginning of the week, which is when I withdrew like the snail into its shell. Hope you have got encouraging word from England & that you are surviving the dickishness of your superiors with as much grace as possible. I was challenged this week when I was invited out to lunch by one of the DMC ladies who wanted to pass onto me my Sabrina Pugh award--no money, but another nice plaque.

Have you ever read Rebecca West? Have just finished rereading her novel about a a Russian Count & his English grandaughter beset by a Russiian terrorist on a train ride from Paris before WW I. An incredibly rich book, rich in historical details, in characterizations, & in language.

Love,

D.

July 15

Dear D.

Ah, good to hear from you.

I won't bore you with all the office intrigues. Suffice it to say that, apart from the Snakepit (and they are generally just mild little bastards—nothing so grand as a Fer de lance or a King Cobra) Istanbul has been okay. But it's like a rich dessert-chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. I really can't wait to get to ______! England sent a note to reassure me. They couldnt rouse the woman with the annotations for my editing process and my (dare I say "my" yet?) the agent dealing with me will be back from vacation on Monday and in touch. Funny, all I need is a little reassurance and I am as relaxed as my kitty cat.

Just get a laptop out of the deal, even if you have to take a course in basket-weaving to do it!

I read West's book on the Balkans and when I discovered she was soft on the Nazis, somehow I did lose some enthusiasm--besides she is not very accurate about her subject as I am finding out. She is a good writer, though. My grasp of contemporary Greek poets is pretty haphazard, to say the least. I am now reading about Saloniki--hope to go there before I leave this side of the lake forever. I keep bumping into people from there or whose families came from there, Turks, Greeks, the few Jews who survived.

Speaking of Nazis, though, this Lebanon business is appalling--just goes to show you that suffering does not necessarily enoble people.

I will try to call if I am still up, so I am not going to say too much more.

Love,

B.

The mammoth....

backlog continues: as before, listed in roman numerals and capital letters. I think of this, with profuse apologies to my friends whose letters appear here, as the split screen existence of living out of the country: below is what has been happening, in a way all these years, in my home town. And here I am in this place, which some folks regard as "exotic," mysterious, all the orientalist fantasy, but in which I have never had the luxury of entertaining that or any other tourist fantasies.

This one runs from April 20 to May 2, with two sections--Nine and Ten aranged sequentially. Oh, the name of this scow, as near as I can translate it, means "round trip." I had not noticed till just now.

IX. (NINE)

20 Nisan

You will NOT be in a corner, so help me even if I have to FEDEX you to Istanbul. I refuse to see a poet friend of mine trapped like that. Like I said, its pretty weird to think of this place as a "back-up" but do consider it so.

Such a terrible turn in our country--not that there is difficulty taking care of our own citizens, but that we--I don't me "we"--I mean THEM, dammit, those monsters in power--that THEY don't care. I was reading a GUARDIAN editorial, by Gary Younge, an Afro-Brit who usually has some compassionate and clear things to say. He calls it "ethnic and class cleansing," what's going on in New Orleans as the rich try to sell out the lands of the poor from under their feet and turn it into a theme park while Houston (ah, Texas!) delivers 25,000 eviction notices to poor black evacuees from Hurrican Katrina. My fave, Steve Bell who is absolutely the most disrespectful, caustic, and brilliant cartoonist titles his latest "THE ANGLO- SAXON MODEL" a drawing of a big fat swank car, wide windshields. This time laid-off "cleansees" --workers at a Peugot factory--shuffle along a fence way in the distance;and over the grate on the front of the car is a lion rampant with the brandname below: FEURCOEUF. Under that the vanity plates read, OR DIE. Say that brandname out loud. It took me a couple of beats to fall on the floor.

I am exhausted. Been staying up really late several nights in a row to finish a paper I just gave at a conference on Moris Farhi's book, YOUNG TURK. Doing that sort of thing now seems to be part of my job. I hope I was honest. I didn't use too many of those awful buzzwords, and I realized that when I let 'er rip about using one's mother tongue, as that was the person and the language where you got your first lessons about love, that a young woman on on side of the table was shaking her head, yes., umm-hmmm at every succeeding clause.

Please keep me posted.

Love,

B.

Apr. 21

Yes, all of the above. & one of those "woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" mornings, having spent another sleepless night, forgot to set the alarm... shuffling about the apartment as fast as I could as the RIGHT instep this morning was aching a little from the change in pressure, & eating the last of the canned peaches, swigging down the hot tea, fortunately I didn't have to tie a tie this morning it being "casual" Friday...

Just made it to Park & Ride, saw the bus parked beside the bus shelter, willing it to stay there until I parked & got out & tramped across the parking lot, wishing I had a red flag I could wave out the window... remembered to bring my umbrella, sat on the rocketing bus remembering, no, letting the iron filings of memory collect as the landscape of delicate, burning greens rolled past- last night sitting in the Morris Library basement going through the microfiche copies of 1968 Reviews, hunting for stories about SDS, demonstrations in front of HUllihen Hall, protests in support of the firing of the two radical political science professors, sit-ins, guerilla puppet theater, speeches by James Bond & Carl Oglesby, the Phoenix Center coffeehouse...

Remembering that I only knew of all this as I was commuting at that time to school & saw the crowds of chanting students on the Mall as I rushed to class & occasionally got a copy of the Heterodoxical Voice, was living in Arden, taking care of my sister's children, 5 of them by then, my Aunt Lillian, who lived for a short while beside me in Arden, had died the year before after first trying to take her own life, my father had yet to die; he died the next year.. my life, the outward part of it, was still centered on my family; the inward part was absorbed with...fighting for my life. Yes.

I was gobbling up little books of poetry by the armful, discovering Cavafy & St. John Perse & Apollinaire & Georg Trakl & Elizabeth Bishop, & staying up all night scribbling ballads & sonnets & imagiste picture poems, revelling in the sounds of the language, & reading Jung & drawing mandalas & recording my dreams & meditating...

I had a vision once around that time. It was one of the great revelations of my life. I had been reciting a mantra under my breath all day (I forget now what it was); it was the focussing that, I think, led to the vision. I came out to my car in the afternoon, a spring afternoon, still muttering the mantra, & what had been a gray, coffin lid of a sky changed suddenly as the clouds rolled open & the sun flashed down & before I knew it I was...

It's so hard to describe. I felt as if I & all the world, & the world felt infinite to me, were what we were, shape & weight & color & meaning, but at the same time I was looking into & through myself & everything else; & I could see that everything was pulsing with, made up of, tiny, dancing, glowing as if burning, particles & that the dance of these particles created all of the forms of the world & that everything, everything was a cause for rejoicing, was rejoicing... I don't know how long this lasted, it seemed to go on forever, but it was so powerfully & beautifully there & I was there, no less than anything there, & no more, but a part of this glowing, joyful dance that was the whole of existence, without end, without beginning...

& then it was gone & I was back at the steering wheel on the highway, weeping & laughing & singing & the sun was still shining & I was still driving & I hadn't run anybody over or driven into a ditch or been stopped by a cop- What could I have said? Officer, I have been having a vision. The world is a cosmic dance & you & me are a part of that dance; in fact, we are dancing at this very moment, if we only could only see...

I could never again find my way to that- place? that state of being? though I have never doubted the truth of what I experienced & have always, even at the darkest of times (for me, for the world) tried to live with the light, meaning, reality of what I continue to believe is the ground of being (mind you, I still find it hard to talk about, write about or even live with)-

This- dance- goes on happening all the time & I stumble out of bed & take note of the dustmice collecting in corners as I head for the stairs & I get off the bus in town & head down King Street & pause at the newspaper kiosks & glance at the headlines & stop for a cup of coffee in the City/County Grille & come up here to the Personnel Dept & turn on my computer & look for a message from Istanbul....


….& now- the grant. The spring Mentor/Mentee celebration in Rodney Square. The noontime mentoring tablings at the big downtown companies. The....

Take care,

Love,

D.

X. (TEN)

23 Nisan (?)

Well,

There was only C., a gringa from D.C. whose father just happened to be Mexican, my Irish flatmate, and me. Then two greek women who living here for a bit, and one of their boyfriends, a Polish tour guide who spoke excellent Greek, I am told. The single Greek woman had long dark wavy hair and looked like an ancient sculpture from one of the walls of Knossos; indeed, she was from Crete and beautiful.

The three musicians would sing something and halfway through, C. and I would look at each other--"that sounds like Spanish!"--a word a phrase imbedded in the th-es, the purring of the Greek; then the owner, a lovely Turkish woman who works as a lawyer the rest of the week, served us some more Turkish wine or beer (neither is very good, I'm afraid), while the musicians sucked up some more raki, and Helen ate a little borek with carrot and garlic (divine.) Later a half-Italian, half-Turkish street artist and a French teacher (and French national) came in. The languages filling the room! Greek, Turkish, English, Spanish, French, the old Anatolian Greek--the way Istanbul, at its best, used to be and the way my quarter is still. All the songs, they tell me, are bar songs, and music of common folk at rest, drunk, in love, in despair...

My friend Ash would disagree, though both Greek andTurkish music are in the minor key (up to 14 intervals between each "western" note in the Turkish) the Greek, unlike the Turkish (and I like both) makes you want to dance, whereas the Turkish just makes you want to break down and cry.

This is C.'s "outing," in the sense of getting out of the house type outing, as her mother has dementia and it is now Chelo's turn to do her six months' turn of care after sister Diana has nearly gone around the bend doing the same. So sad. Her mother was brilliant, manic depressive all her life, an activist, learned languages the way you and I might take a turn around the block; now she bites C. and her husband when they try to get her out of bed... C.'s husband is a crass but good-looking guy (how little that matters except to C., I guess)...a dead ringer for Stanley Kowalski--most of the time I want to just smack him; but even he is trying in an impossible situation.

C. taps the table in time to the music.

I was at an acquaintance's art opening--took us an hour of sitting in that most frustrating of phenomenon here, an Istanbul traffic jam. Then, I hate to say, such high prices for nothing special. Even the Biennale (art show) this summer had virtually nothing that speaks/spoke to me, whereas Ash and I caught a Jean du Buffet (sp.?) at a local museum this summer and loved it. But then du Buffet like "outsider art" (coined the phrase, in fact) recognizing, I think, that that least is alive. After Sinan, after the Byzantine mosaics, and the Anatolian kilims and carpets, what passes for contemporary art here is largely a poor second.

What I really also wanted to suggest or ask or both--do you have a TESOL certificate? If you don't can that job of yours at least pay for THAT? It would be good to have and useful whereever you land. Also, I spoke to the acquaintance from _____________ at the opening: if you have the certificate, you could pretty much get a job at any time; if you don't you could work part time and study for the certificate part time at the same time (if you are still with me.) It only takes a month full time.

Let me know.

I am running out of steam: the weather, balmy and sunny, has shifted with the poyraz and is now going down into the low 40s tonite. For us, that is a bit chilly.

Love,

B.

Apr 25

Once again my dear,

Your voice sounds in my ear on a Sunday afternoon & I feel that I can talk & not be guarded. So many people- everyone actually- I talk to that I'm at all close to either tell me I don't know what I am talking about when I point out the "slings & arrows of outrageous fortune" or pat me on the head & say: There, there, David everything's going to be all right.

"Everyone actually" is not true strictly speaking. There is my sister. However there is that blackened waste where our child's trust in the world once grew. Which we can't speak of. Which for my sister doesn't exist. Because, acknowledging its existence would mean acknowledging that our father wounded us terribly.

Of course, in a way, it's harder for my sister because she was my father's favorite. But why this blinds her completely to his drinking, his cruelty to me & on occasion to our mother is something I can't understand. I understand wanting to make a god out of someone but where does such a need come from? Or rather how can she hold on to such a delusion when life is so hard for her?

Ah well- she has to do her own awakening & I have to accept that she may never awake. Not that awakening & staying awake is a piece of cake.

& here I am & it's almost lunch time & & all I really want to do is go to bed. & I am tutoring a Mister Lim this afternoon- writing & speaking. But only for an hour.

More later when I feel more like one of the frisking lambs.

Take care,

Love,

D.

27 Nisan

Ah, my friend. I long letter will follow, but for now just a nice bit of news on my side of the lake(s): a British agent has requested the entire mss, after seeing a sample of BEASTLY. Make obeisances to the appropriate dieties for me!

Love,

B.

27 Apr

My dear,

This is good news. I still automatically knock on wood & toss spilt salt over my shoulders (making sure I'm not too noticeable), but I don't know any deities, literary or of any sort, I can ask to intercede on your behalf. But I do send my best wishes & am keeping my fingers crossed for you.

& I still do not feel like a frisking lamb or any kind of lamb. No, more like a mean old sheep with stiff joints & an ache in one hoof & the wool getting too thin to keep out the morning chill. Yes, mean.

So much so, I want to waggle my tongue at the poor middle aged lady who gets on the express before I do & always sits in the same front seat & seats there with her legs crossed & her hands clasped on her lap, rubbing them from time to time as if she is rubbing in lotion (but she isn't, I know, because I've watched closely) & who, from time to time, narrows her eyes & purses her plump mouth into a little beatific smile (maybe she's enjoying a fart, I don't know)- & then, as we are nearing Rodney Square, she starts talking to herself (with no _expression on her face whatsoever); fortunately, she's not a Jesus shouter.

& then when I am feeling really mean, something happens to bring me back to the incoming tide of my heart. Like this morning. I saw a spare black man of indeterminate age get on the bus with a little boy at a bus stop in the wasteland south of Wilmington. I saw them at a distance because the little boy was riding on the man's shoulders. I could hear the little boy's voice piping in the back of the bus. They got off near D_______. & when they got to the sidewalk, the man immediately bent down & lifted the child back onto his shoulders, saying: Up ya go, my man- the child looking about him with a serious face, as if he is used to taking in the world from that height...

& now, I suddenly remember myself as a small child & the sheltering embrace of my father's arms as he held me inside his great coat on a cold fall day when I joined him after school on the edge of the field where he was watching the high school football team practice. That's one of the few occasions when I can remember his arms around me...

Yes, there was that. & thank heavens I'm not as mean as I sometimes feel. Sometimes I wish I could sleep & let my life flow on like a river underground. Which, of course it does. But, I come back too soon. Like this morning, reaching up again & again in the dark to grab the clock & squint at its glowing face, too exhausted to get up & do anything useful but not weary enough to slip back under the surface.

Ah well- enough. I have to start calling school coordinators & lining up enough participation by kids & their mentors to make a good showing in R. Square at a public celebration late in May at the Farmer's Market. & check my City email to find out if the grant lady was able to finish working on the grant...

Good luck again.

Love,

28 Nisan

It is now 10:10 Friday morning, 3:10 your time. Sunny and crisp. Men are replacing ailing red roof tiles with new ones on the urban "valley"--a clutter of roofs and old buildings the we look out over in order to view the Galata tower beyond--so I awoke to a tap-tap-tapping sound and when I looked, here were these fellows with minimal tools scraping the wooden underpinnings, sawing away rotten parts, and stacking the tiles neatly for the next step. The cats looked on, rather calmly I thought, although they have little fear here in Istanbul where they are treated quite well. It is three years bad luck, I think I told you, if you bring harm to a cat.

It is sunny, at least--Wednesday was a bit horrid: rain and snow showers, no inspiration to go out had I not had to go to work.

Love,

B.

29 Nisan

P.S. SKYPE is the name of the phone service. That call—almost an hour--cost 1.215 USD. Yes, just a little more than a dollar.

Ah well, I am pooped!

I will write later.

Love,

B.

30 April

My Dear,

….Once again, what a treat to hear your voice. & what a Monday morning. The pale blush of color spreading through more & more of the gray trees tells me it is spring but it's still cold in the morning, still cold enough for me to wear a wool cap, scarf & winter coat.

Though I'm not quite as groggy as I've been for weeks in the morning as I found a cheap electric clock in the the drugstore & had enough money in my wallet to buy it. Now I don't have to rouse myself at 4 or 5 in the morning & force myself out of bed because there was no alarm to alert me to get moving. A bad habit, waking, then rolling over for just a few more winks & opening my eyes an hour later.

I told you I have started going through journals again, Surprized by poems in a ''73 journal, the year I moved onto Cleveland Avenue into one room in that Scarangello house on the corner of Kershaw, met Barry M. who moved in downstairs, met Jane through Barry, met Richard through the both of them, met Bart later when Jane left Barry, met Eric S., began to change my life, nights at the Deer Park, mornings at the Deluxe, talking, writing, moving beyond iambic pentameter & latinate balance...

Met R. one snowy January night when he came to visit Barry & Jane was there & we finished Barry's bottle of cognac & R. said let's go out to my place ( a cabin in a woods on top of a hill above the creek ), but first let's stop at the Deer Park package store & get a bottle of Scotch. So we did, down Creek road, snow piled high, snow still falling. up & up into the hills...

This is where the omniscient narrator turns aside & intones: & Reader, I lost my heart. I can still remember the tickling feeling of R's angel curls against my face as we stood in the middle of the one room cabin, Barry & Jane cuddling on the bed, the Moldau racing through dark forests on the record player, & R. holding a piece of mica-flecked quartz picked up walking in the fields & I was cradling that hand with one of my hands & staring at the stone turning it in the light, standing so close.... hair brushed my face...

Ah well... There are terrible burdens we must carry but also treasure. I can't remember now. Have you been to this island in the sea of Marmara or are you going? The only island I've been to is Crete & that didn't feel like an island. Good luck like with this person who is going to read your ms.

Take care,

Love, D.

30 Nisan
Dear D.

...USD—yes, something we watch go up and down. Right now the USD (US dollar) is down compared to the YTL (yeni Turkish Lire). In other words the phone call was sheep, cheep, cheap.

We, too, are getting spring. The lodos ("s" with a tail, so the word is pronounced "low-dosh") came through yesterday bringing warmth and a whomping case of spring fever. I called in well and was able to go to the post office, the cafe for breakfast and reading, and putter down a few side streets when Fatma, my cleaning lady arrived. Yes, I confess. I have always been so uncomfortable with the idea of having someone do my housework. Fatma, wide as she is tall, incredibly cheerful, whirrs through the house like a bumblebee. She speaks very fast, on and on, in Turkish as if I understood her perfectly--and I don't at all. She sometimes puts things in places that defy my sense of organization, but in the end, I get a clean house, and she gets a decent wage. It's the best I can do, since I don't have a wife. I guess that makes me part of the [Turkish] middle class. So this is how one gets stuck on the flypaper of class! Some sort of nouveau version of colonial privilege? I couldn't do this in New York: I could barely afford the electricity to power a vacuum cleaner in my old apartment back home, let alone pay someone to run the thing.

There, I have confessed.

I forget if I told you about my visit to the island. A friend, S., has a place out there in the middle of the Marmara--yes, now I remember, I did. Still remembering. It is odd to see "ÇOP, Istanbul Büyük Belediyedesi" (Trash, Municipality of Greater Istanbul") on the island dumpsters. We were also greeted by a number of dogs; and, indeed, on this island there seem to be a greater balance between the dogs and the cats than on the others. (People DO keep dogs as pets, by the way, despite the Prophet favoring cats over them.) I will attempt to send you pictures one more time, but let me know if you have gotten the other one despite the address mixup.

I read your recollections and wish I had such good memories of at least one of the past parade of lovers. Closest, oddly, may have been ________.... Now, of course, I think of other things; and those who define their lives solely through relationships look at me and, I suppose, felt pity. How patronizing! I have an acquaintance here (gringa) who cannot say five sentences without referring to her husband, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Stanley Kowalski and affects the same manner. No thank you. I am actually pretty content in terms of my personal life--the work life, no; the lack of a real home, no. Those latter two things are an irritant, but this, too, shall pass.

Listen, hope you are well.

Love,

B.

1 Mayis

Dear David, Sorry to be so quiet--it's the end of the semester and even at this toy university I suddenly have a lot to do. I also am swamped with the onine course grading. Just to let you know, I submitted your CV to my dept head. He's a charming sonofabitch--shallow and bourgoise, married to a Turk and, I suppose, living in his own orientalist world. However, he isn't that awful to work with. Nothing may come of it, but we shall see.

More when I come up for air.

Love,

B.

P.S. How about a certificate in ESL, EFL or whatever acronym means? you could potentially work with non-native speakers… the early part of the summer or asap?

Dear B.,

I don't know how much you think about fear, but I find myself coming upon it every time I get onto one of the middle class, "stakeholder", "power player", market-driven, bottom-line roads... & sooner or later, I come upon something terrible- like a car wreck where everyone has stopped & got out of their bodies & does nothing...

People are afraid to come forward & do anything. People are afraid to see that what has happened isn't an anomaly, an "accident". People are afraid to see that what has happened is the result of something terribly wrong with their reality. People are afraid to see that they have made their reality, that they are responsible for changing that reality.

I think it is this fear that drives people into the crazy tangles of fundamentalist or extreme positions of any sort or that backs people into their bleak neo-conservative or post-modernist corners. Is it this fear that fuels narcissism or does narcissism help breed the fear? I get this far & then I am faced with: Where has the narcissism come from? Basta! I have to start making phone calls & checking my City email & ... you name it. & no, I don't have a TESOL certificate , but my Special Ed award would pay for it. Thanks for the tip. Take care,

Love,

D.

Dear D.

P.S. Perhaps you can get a nice infusion of that cash they are supposed to spend on you and get the TESOL thing in June--stretch out the money they have supposedly been holding for you: books, living expenses, etc.

Love,

B.

2 May 2006

Yes, another Tuesday, another morning here in the City/County Building, another morning edged with the cold, even though the trees are all filled in now with leaves, but one of "those" mornings, you know, when you turn off the alarm & say to yourself: I'll just shut my eyes for a few minutes... & when I next opened my eyes, the morning light was flooding in the window (my bedroom faces east)-

This is my 2nd cup of coffee. My eyes are finally opening beyond a drooped slit. People in the Department are coming in now. I have to make a copy of pages in my grammar book for Mr. Lim (my tutee, a nice Korean man in his 40's, here at UD to research climate change), pages that cover the present perfect & how to use "since" & "for"--- I have to look up the tenses & usages because I haven't thought of the rules since I last tutored 3 years ago &, to tell the truth, I've always gone by my ear.

& speaking of the truth, or "truthiness", have you read about or better yet seen the clip from the White House Correspondents Dinner? This is where the faux talk show host, Stephen Colbert, the one who pretends to support Bush, tore into Bush- & just about everybody else, including Justice Scalia, Senator McCain AND the press.

One of the many barbs he aimed at Bush goes like this; Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday- no matter what happened on Tuesday." Of the press he said, when claiming he'd make the perfect press secretary & why? Waving at the room filled with the press he said, "I have the best qualification. I hold them in utter contempt."

Throughout his routine the laughter kept coming a beat late, as if people couldn't believe what they were hearing & had to take a breath before they could clap like good sports. Not having TV, I've never seen him before, or heard of him, but my left of center Progressive Democrat buddy, Paula, was able to get the video clip on her computer & played it for me.

He is really funny- & with a savagery that is almost gleeful & so quick. & his performance is both beautifully shaped, but free flowing. It's like watching a man juggle with knives, while aiming them at everyone in the room & dancing at the same time. I had to laugh out loud again & again. Finally, someone speaking truth to power, right in power's face. Check on truthout for the story. & now I must move on & start making some calls.

Take care,

Love,

D.

Race...

..to catch up: Lots of letters follow (to be read from the bottom of April 17 up; each section is headed by Roman numerals and the number in parentheses):

VIII. (EIGHT)

Three Istanbullu Kedilersi in a Pear Tree

4 Apr

Well, my dear.

I hope you are revelling in budding & blossoming & bare skin weather. We had some of that this weekend. Then a rain storm blew in early last night, the wind dashing rain at the windows & this morning winter is back- a winter coat, wool cap & scarf morning; but I can look out the City Building windows to the east & the river & watch the white clouds of the ornamental pears below sway like dancers in the cold wind...

I'm sorry if I missed a call from you this weekend. It's always good to hear your voice. I hope you get good news soon about your novel. I have been laboring at this grant narrative, which I've just completed except for a few key pieces of data- teen pregnancies, teen shootings, something called a Children's Well-being Score. Now I've got to rework the budget. & then start sending proposals out & I don't know how long the approval process through the Mayor's office will take or even if the Mayor's Office is willing to support this new initiative. We shall see.

I started cleaning my room Sunday, starting with removing the pall of dust, borrowing my roommate's vacuum cleaner. Had to begin sorting through the piles of stuff I have shoved into milk crates, felt like an archaeologist, finding old letters, cards, drawings, well-worn maps of Paris, Florence, Athens... my poetry. Of course, I had to stop right there, began going through the folders, going back & back, all the way back to the early 60's... imagiste, French surrealiste, Eliotic inspired stuff. This doesn't appall me anymore- I was learning my craft; I had to start somewhere. What fills me when I read the stuff now is a kind of sad wonderment- how much was hidden. Not how much I hid from others but how much I was hiding from myself. Even so there are some interesting pieces here & there, when I hit the nail on the head, didn't get in my own way by being too clever.

I wish I could go on here, thinking on the screen, trying to find the words that keep me going... but, I've got to hunt down the missing numbers & start making phone calls, setting up the committee outreach meeting, writing up a letter to go to Department heads....

Take care,

Love.

D.

Hi,

....H. send a text message to my cell phone that she took off in one piece--14 K over her cabin limit, but they loved her hair (the Africans braided her fuzzy brownish-reddish hair with long extensions by way of a goodbye present.)

I could not face coming home to a one-person meal after all the ones we have cooked together or somehow just managed to have lying around, so I went to one of my neighborhood places where they have good Chilean wine and passable nouveau--but it isn't the food, it's the ambience and the fact that the waiters are nice. Of course this time there was a new one who was running like never before; indeed, it WAS never before because this was his first day. Well, in came a waiter from last summer who probably doesn't work there any more: "Madame! How are you? Where are you?"

"Oh, I'm here, just busy."

He leans over and takes my hand, kisses it in that very Turkish way one greets certain people you like and respect--young children do it when greeting you at Ramazan. Upon his departure he waves: "Good bye! I love you too much!" (Translation--goodbye, loveya lots) And these are the small things that get you through.

I got accustomed to coming "home." Now, as I opened the lock and Emma, the cat, greets me anxiously in the dark, the place feels cavernous--and who wants to live in a cave?

It has cooled off slightly (8C or 46 F.) and the wind has picked up--poyraz, NNE straight from Moscow; tommorrow, Sunday, I go out to Burgaz, one of the islands in the middle of the Marmara, where my friend S. lives.

Did you ever get that CD with all the pictures?

Love,

B.

My Dear,

No I did not get the CD.

Love,

D.

Apr 7

My Dear,

A red sky in the morning- sailor's warning... well, here I am despite the warning. I don't know what will happen first. Either my eyelids are going to fall shut & refuse to open or my fingers are going to refuse to hit the right keys. Then I will have to proceed like one of those fabled monkeys & just keep typing until I reproduce War & Peace.

I guess it's finally hit me- all these sleepless nights. THIS is why April is the cruellest month- plus March. The weather is so changeable, my feet don't know what to do.

& yet, & yet.. the first flush of color stirring in the gray trees mesmerizes. & what was it Wordsworth said about seeing the flash of gold of spring flowers massed on a hillside- it makes his heart leap up. Yes, it does. It does mine.

Even seeing daffodils coming up in the flower tubs on Main Street, especially knowing I brought about those tubs being placed on the street 15 years ago when I was Community liaison to the Newark Business Association & I planted those spring bulbs a few years ago when I was still free to do so & got funds from the Rodel company to pay for Main Street plantings... I nod to them inwardly; we're both still here; we blossom when it's time...

I just wish the blossoming of poetry were as regular- Ah, spring is here; time for an ecologue. The moon is whittled down to the most delicate of cradles, holding the old moon "in hir armes"; time for a ballade.

The young are walking down the street, gloveless, hatless, coatless; their bare necks are a revelation- time for, what did Lorca call them, saetas?, little darts.

The headlines finally blazon forth a judgement- Libby Reveals... Time for a jerimiad. You know, I have always found that kind of poem so hard to do. Not because of its topicality so much as finding the right balance of anger... & love.

I remember at some point in the mid-80's laboring over a Main Street poem, this was when the street was filling up at night with out of town teen agers mostly, cruising & lining the street in packs. & I tried to write a poem out of my anger about & pity for the chaos of those young lives, contrasting their crude & unfocussed energy with the safe & comfortable lives of the people who lived, mostly out of sight, in the big old houses on quiet, empty Orchard Road, for whom I felt only anger, for the privilege they possessed & the sense of responsibilty they didn't...

& I was meeting with Pat then & had showed her the first draft & she said: Your right to be angry, it belongs here, you should use it, only, try to make sure there's always, in the balance, a little more love. & I couldn't find the love. I didn't really know the young enough to know what was loveable about them & I refused to love the safely tucked away & oblivious middle class people. So, I had to put the poem away.

Any poem I've ever written that has worked, no matter how big or small it was, came out of what I knew was true. I was shut out of the truth of the lives of both the young & the middle class or I couldn't find the truth. I pity the young; I still pity them. I would like so much to create free cultural programming for the young, especially the disadvantaged young because I believe that access to art, making it, at what ever level one is capable of working at, should be the right of everyone, needs to be the right of everyone, as necessary not just as air & water but clean air & clear water...

O, well- & here I haven't got my grant finished so I can stay on here... I need more coffee. I have to track down some statistics.

I hope you enjoy your visit to your friend on his island. I love islands. Take care,

Love,

D.

12 Nisan

….Oh, D., I have been there. Waking up in a cold sweat and wondering what I was going to do, feeling like there was nothing but a blank wall in front of me. Being very down, indeed, and then somehow, as much of a tidal wave as it was, it passed over me and, for no good reason, I felt cheerful again and I could get up and get my ass out the door, myself into the sun (cheer is much harder in the rain, somehow.) In many ways, I was pretty lucky for a long time, but I had to do some fancy dancing to get there. Then the chasm... I was enraged that no one seemed to care, that those that were supposed to would not.

I am enraged, too, at the monsters that drive our world and the feeling of impotence so many of us share. I ran into this over-privileged private school boy journalist--of course his name is "Hugh"--who just wrote a very silly book about the Turks that reads like 19th century phrenology manual. My Turkish friends are furious at the implicit racism in it. Here I was lumbering down my Long Hill (that's what the address means) and there he was climbing up it with an absent grin on his face. Oh J.'s in H., he says, we're down at O. till August (the house they just built). He looks behind him, in the direction I am headed: It's pretty 'active' down THERE. I said I lived down THERE at the bottom of the hill. Well, you certainly have plenty of male company down THERE--

Yes, there are men and boys on the street. The women are inside, though you do see some go to and fro. AND you see the baskets they lower so the bakkal keepers can put in soap or some tomatoes they forgot. But it isn't a bad neighborhood. No one threatens me. They say hello in the morning.

I guess, it's my own class resentment coming out. He didn't DO anything, but there's a retirement fund and a nice British pension and a relatively reasonably British health care system awaiting him. He has his future assured and I don't.

Things are okay now, the temp will hit 71 tomorrow and my tomato and pepper and basil seedlings are doing nicely. The kitties are yowling, this year's crop of kittens is about to be born, the meyhanes (bar and meze--appetizers--places) are filled. Laud sing cuckoo!

Keep the faith, dammit. We must.

Love,

14 Nisan

My dear,

You get the cold sweats; I get the paralyzing chills- eyeing my gas gauge running on empty, making it to the Newark Library to tutor & the tutee fails to show up, too late to go to the bank, counting the few bills left in my wallet, getting home & rooting in the bare pantry & finding the packet of kashka someone gave me with handwritten instructions on it, figuring I have enough money to get a can of string beans & a little bag of sunflower seeds at Happy Harry's to go with the kaska & still have enough for coffee this morning...

Feeling I have been shoved into a tight corner & no way out... which isn't true but when I am feeling chilled like that I can't see the way out. Much better this morning. I know I can afford to take $25 out from my checking account & I am to meet on Friday with a Chinese family that wants to set up a tutoring schedule for the father & the little boy. & I even have enough to get a $1.50 egg sandwich downstairs at the City Grille for lunch before I go out to the bank.

It could be worse I was thinking last night as I sat at the kitchen table & my roommate asked how was I doing & I said: It could be better- & barked out a laugh.& then I said I was just thinking of the woman I saw get on the bus on King Street on my way home. She came on with her friend, another black woman, & the friend was a large, wild eyed, raggedy headed woman muttering to herself about God & Jesus. & I found myself absorbed by the other woman who turned out to be blind & was being shepherded by the wild woman, the blind woman a neatly dressed woman in her late fifties.

The blind woman stood at the front of the bus, turning towards the seats & began patting the air in front of her, smiling the most incredibly generous smile, saying: Is there a seat here somewhere? & of course, someone did get up & said: you can have mine & the blind woman sat down, folding up her walking stick & sat there- not like a helpless, grateful or resentful person, but sat with hands on her lap, head up, & still smiling, like a gracious queen while her friend stood at the front of the bus glaring off into the distance, rolling her head around & still muttering about Jesus.

It's hard to feel sorry for yourself when you see people like that, I said to my roommate.

People are coming into the Department now. The Latina who works across the hall from me & who mentors two teens at the Latin American Community Center has just unlocked her door calling out greetings in Spanish & all I could think to say in reply was: un otro mundo possible & she smiled. (What the crowds chant in Venezuela when Chavez gives speeches.)

& I see where Neil Young has just released an album, created in two weeks, with songs denouncing Bush & demanding his impeachment & calling for peace- Do you remember peace? One of the lines goes.

Do you remember Ohio? & all the other songs? & being young? O my...

Take care,

Love,

D.

16 April

My Dear,

I must have got some sleep last night as I don't feel quite so thick headed or as defeated as I did yesterday- perhaps overwhelmed & paralyzed is a more accurate description of my state yesterday. Even though I lay awake in bed this morning shifting my feet about under the disheveled covers to try & keep my feet warm while it was still dark, waiting for the alarm to ring.

I even got ahead myself this morning after tea & porridge (someone gave me a cannister of steel cut organic oatmeal!), making a sandwich for lunch, leafing through my work notebook, deciding what I should do at work today, & reading another chapter in a book lent to me by one of my Progressive Democrat buddies in Personnel, Confessions of An Economic Hit Man, a tell all expose by a man who made a bundle working as an "economist" for a so-called consultant firm that was created in the 60's to work surreptiously for the US military industrial complex....& now has recanted, surviving like Ishmael to tell his story...

Something that I knew but had never read about to see how well-organized & planned out the whole process was (still is). The writer lays it all out....

Do you recall the Sweet Honey in the Rock song that goes "Chile your blood runs red through Soweto"?

& now here I am with all my work to do, must move ahead on my work plan, start the begging letter to City Council for a "gift" to cover a year's worth of background checks; start going through the grants again & figure out which ones are the most likely to bring in some funding for this job, for there to be a job after July; & to figure out how I am going to survive in July if there is no job here...

& a part of me is as angry as the boy was when I look at what is happening in Iraq & what might happen in Iran & how the desperate have been driven to irrational violence, angry as the boy was in 1956 when the Russian tanks were moving through the streets of Budapest to quell the uprising, the boy who wanted to join the freedom fighters & leap out of alleys to toss molotov cocktails at the advancing tanks...

& a part of me is still standing at the Park & Ride bus shelter this cold morning, looking westwards at the trees standing on Chestnut Hill, seeing for the first time how all the grayness is gone from the woods & that it is lit now with a fire of delicate greens, the part of me that just wants to walk away from the parking lot & head west into the woods where spring has finally come... & just keep walking...

O well- I am so glad I have you to say all this to...

Take care,

Love,

D

VII. (SEVEN)
23 – 24 Mart, an e-exchange with another friend which somehow got entitled, "Living La Vida Loco":

Dear E.

…The lodos (lo-dosh) has swept through, blowing all the flowerpots over on the balcony and sweeping the sky clean of clouds, its hot breath driving the temperature up to 71 degrees... It whistles around the corner of the house: nothing ever stays the same, nothing is the only thing you can count on...

Too bad I missed the G. I hope he will be okay.

So, nu?

XXOO,

Dear Prima -- your Istanbul pathway home sounds at once romantic and melancholic. Glad you and Hardy are in communication. It's a weird moment to be weaving narratives. Seems to me the writing's more important than the publishing. Just now that is.

Do the hookah smokers wear nargile socks?

But seriously folk, I've no idea about G, He's always been a cypher to me. M. is beautiful and smart, I guess. Cultivated. To be honest it all has the feel of a leveraged buyout rather than a marriage, but then I've always been a romantic. Not to mention melancholic. To say nothing of cynic.

It's been a hectic week and I'm hoping to pop your
disk into the computer soon, put on my silk slippers and kick
back.
I'll e as soon as I return from your Istanbul. In the meantime, watch the flying flowerpots.
xoxox, E.

Hmmm,

That is probably a pretty accurate description of the Istanbul, and of Turkey, for that matter. Just listen to the music. If I understood the words—still Turkish challenged, this one--I would hear nothing but tales of lost love, betrayals, sorrow; but all beautifully sung to the thrum of unfamiliar stringed instruments, some of them as old as Byzantium, some ancient as Babylon. Then the hysteria of western music busts into it, as if that could make everything all better again. It can't. On so many levels, the anodynes of the West, as I am sure I don't have to tell you, are pretty ineffectual now, though here as elsewhere who pants for this, pants for bliss... It slithers away as always.

The lodos has raced out of here like a djinn: I only lost a little plastic saucer I had left to catch water from a dripping pot; and we are back to grey clouds, only the true voice of the Bosphorus freighters giving an occasional bellow to the signal towers on shore, seagulls as Ash says, "like handkerchiefs, floating down in the air," the drift of coal and wood smoke across my view, the pewter huddle of Tophane palace sticking up over the ugliness of commercial buildings in between.

However, the seeds I cadged--heirloom tomatoes, Genovese basil, habanero peppers, are coming up: some I will grow on the balcony, as the domates climb; some I will farm out to a friend who lives on Burgazada (one of the Marmara islands) and some to my former Dean, a very dear man with all of the goodness of the Turks rolled into one person. We sneak off, eat fish, and talk gardening at one of the neighborhood Lokantas when I can't get my dept. to cut the umbilicus between themselves and the company cafeteria. My nickname for that is the "trough," which has stuck, despite the rector's pretentious christening of it as "The Pierre Loti Gourmet Restaurant."

So, yes, I live between melancholy--a kind of subclinical homesickness--the splendour of times gone by, the kindness of strangers, a simian curiosity that never seems to go away, some glorious moments, and eternal surprise. I write. I read. I walk. I just can't remember the last time I was bored.

The postman has deliver five copies of PMLA--the MLA mag for January--and only the one on top is mine. I kept wondering why I got so many until I looked at the names on the others. "The foreign woman is a professor--these all must be hers." I guess I get to
touch base with some of my academic colleagues from here to Ankara and back.

Odd about G. If anyone is a romantic, he is. I never met her--left a message with her to call me once, and I am almost sure she never delivered it…. [Here follows a discussion of passports and national health care systems or the lack thereof.]

Speaking of which, I must hazard a Turkish dentist this afternoon. Teeth are such a bad design; and I am now trying to save every chip.

Hope you enjoy the photos--there are more where those come from. In a month, H.'s room will be a guest room with a view. (Hint.)

XXOO,

March 24

Dear D.,

Well, another rejection e-slip, through a friend. Not taking any new clients, etc. etc. Poop.

I will wax more eloquent on other subjects when I get home from work. It IS warmer here, if that is any inducement to you. Yes, the winters are sometimes damp and horrid, but not very, and certainly not compared to the US northeast. I also thought of you as I sat down at my round table in the living room with my young friend Hardy and we read each other's work and gave comments. Keeps us writing, and I avoid A.'s sotted pyrotechnics. He is hopeless at night.

If I want to, I can make time to write and not be overwhelmed with work. That is the advantage here.

Could you wear down slippers if they were affordable?

Sob, H. is leaving sooner than expected.

Love,

My dear,

I am sorry to hear about the rejection slip. I am trying to gear myself up for another effort to send out ms. It always feels like a military campaign. I need to be more methodical & determined, but when the SASE's with my handwritten name & address on them start filling up the mail box, I tend to give up.

Down slippers sound like heaven. Right now I am wearing old cloth boots that my aunt paid for over 15 years ago & that I got at Abbotts' Shoes. The most comfortable winter boots I ever wore.

I'm glad to hear that you have people to read with & get feedback from. There is no one here now that I know who writes, especially since I moved on from the N. Arts Alliance when I conducted evening readings, mostly attended by local university students, some of them talented writers & knowledgeable about the tradtion of poetry, one of whom could recite poetry & amazed us all one evening by reciting the entire Lovesong of Prufrock ("I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my trousers rolled, do I dare to eat a peach, do I hear the mermaids singing each to each... I do not think that I can hear them now..." the ending goes something like that, as I remember).

The oral bard was one of those bright children of academic privilege, but with a social conscience. His mother was apparently a renown Fitzgerald scholar who went to literary conferences in Vancouver & Spain & Nice & took Nathan with her. A tall, slender pale young man with hair falling over his eyes, as enthusiatic about poetry as he was about peace, got arrested several times for picketing in NYC & in DC... I liked working with him (he helped bring students to the readings; but fortunately he struck no sparks in me or I would have been inviting him to supper (my one & only seduction strategy)- & after food, good talk & some wine he like all the rest would finally push his way from the table & stumble out into the night... I never found out how to get from the table to the couch to bed unless someone was so drunk he fell into bed & then instantly fell asleep.

Although, I have to admit, there is something to be said for having a warm body in bed beside one, even an inert lump of a body. I use to always wake early in the morning on Cleveland Avenue & watch the morning light shine on the planes of R's face, then gradually filling in the hollows, transfixed by having R. so close to me I could wonder at the blue of those eyelids. It was calming to listen to that breathing, to watching another's chest rise & fall.

I have just now remembered reading some beginning pages in one of Proust's books where the narrator goes on & on for pages (I think the sentence ran that long) about lying awake beside his beloved & feeling- I don't remember exactly now what the narrator put on the pages because at that point I threw the book down, thinking what a lot of nonsense, creating in effect a whole world out of an experience with another person where basically one is alone... & I have to confess now more than 50 years later that I can see the point. I mean, remembering those mornings being awake beside a sleeping R. I remember a sensual peacefulness that for as long as that sleep outweighed the frustration of picking at the knot of love that hung between us when we were both awake and then the unsatisfied longing & the sadness I was always left with after R. dressed & walked out the door.

O my- how did I get to 108 East Cleveland Avenue & the room that is gone because the house is gone on the corner of Kershaw Street? Because, of course, it's still with me, isn't it? The room, the bed, the morning light, the morning quiet & my breathing matching the long swell of another's breathing.

A poem there, if I could hold onto the pieces long enough.

Take care,

Love,

D.

Dear D.

(Oops!)

Yes, I remember telling my students--some students back in the Old Country, in fact--that the question of the weather is NOT small talk, but very, very important. Not fighting with the weather but simply being able to be in it, sloughing off that protective layer and being able just to BE (and hence the lure of the tropics for me) always seemed so liberating! I could think of other things. I had that thought--my yo-yoing between a climate, between a city where you have to confront the complexities of 21st (as it is now) century life and my less urban, more animal soul.

Were you sending me a poem? (Would you?) Was that the invitation in the question, "Let me know what you think of any of this as you listen to the gulls' cries & watch the ferry boats come in & go out & cross your bridge & go up & down the hill & pass the fish shops & the hawkers- & when you have the time." Or did you mean let you know what I thought of the idea of writing, capturing that "moment"? When it comes to poetry, yes, that seems so much what you do; when it comes to fiction--or at least the novel--I think it becomes a whole other can of worms. I was trying to explain to a friend how I felt visited--no, possessed--by the people in my work that I have created; and I have been variously "possessed" by a woman with a tail; a rhythm and blues-loving, talking muskrat; an effete and quite dead letter writer newly arrived in Hell; a pair of Siamese twins born on the cusp of the change from Ottoman empire to Turkish republic; a black mathematician en route to Columbia University, an Argentine sculptor who makes awful public statues, a scrufulous stray Latin American dog who in a previous life was a wife beater... For that matter, before my poetry was silenced by Paul Mariani, I have even possessed by a sheep f---er. They are voices which suddenly come up in my head, live extraordinary lives--or very ordinary ones save for the adventures that overtake them, that tell stories in my head. I