spiritopellegrino

Here is a tip for travelers in Beirut: when you get into a cab, you say “Servis” and the taxi costs a quarter the normal price, but then is also free to pick up other passengers along the way. You get a practically free ride, and a generally jollier one.

I decided to go to Tripoli on one of my days there, and after inquiring at the hotel about a car and getting a price that raised ethical questions for me (“Do you really feel like playing the role of pasha, today?”), I decided to take the bus, which I was told was 4 thousand lebanese pounds, i.e., a little under $3.00. My very old taxi driver, who was manning a marvelous but clunky early 70s Cadillac, couldn’t find the station and had a very bad habit of stopping in the middle of traffic when he was confused (every few seconds) so I got out and paid him an outrageous 10 thousand lebanese pounds ($7) for the failed trip. I asked a gentleman on the street where the bus station was and he asked, skipping a couple of steps, “Vous allez où?” “Trablous,” I replied, and immediately he gestured up the street, with what I am now going to call a Beiruti flourish: ”Voilà, monsieur.” I turned to see a small bus trundling down the road, spewing exhaust. Looking back once to check his face, which remained calm and slightly amused, I hailed it, imagining it wouldn’t stop. But it did! It was no random act of generosity: this was a Servis mini-bus, which picks people up and drops them off as it makes its way up the coast. The other triumph was that it turned out to be 1 thousand pounds cheaper than the normal bus. One-way Beirut to Tripoli: $2.00.

My model traveller is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was given to dining with counts in castles one night and walking and camping with gypsies the next. I was staying in a very nice hotel (another tip: when in Beirut splurge and stay in The Albergo) and happily taking the $2 Servis bus to Tripoli, soon to make my way through labyrinthine streets where no one speaks a European language. So yes, I soon started to feel unseemly pride for being one with the people, just, you know, going up to Tripoli and getting on with my business there. Of course, everyone else on the bus was saying, “What’s he doing here?” which I am going to hope in some cases was followed by, “Well, good for him.”

I observed the beautiful flexibility of the system, the fluidity with which people mounted and disembarked, the cordial familiarity they had with the driver, the driver’s intelligence and fluency as he navigated traffic, pulled over when asked, took money as people dismounted, always remembering where they got on and how much their pro-rated fare was. I was happy and curious to see women using the service, traditional women who nonetheless had to go about their daily activities and couldn’t afford to let niceties such as moral codes stand in their way. (On the Arabian peninsula, one never sees a woman getting around on her own. At most women accompany each other.) I was enjoying the variety of speeds allowed on a Middle Eastern highway. The resulting effect is apparently chaotic, with vehicles using the same roadway for widely varying purposes, but in fact it was a pretty functional ballet. There was active traffic the whole way, but it flowed.

I talked a bit to the man next to me, who spoke English and French fairly well. He is Christian. Others on the bus were Muslim. But the main feeling was that everyone was Lebanese, afloat together on their unpredictable Lebanese boat. Life wasn’t easy but at the same time things were on the whole pretty good. They were lucky to be here, not in Syria. They belonged here. They were getting on with things, shuttling from one arena of activity to another. They were connected to their people at each end of their trajectory, probably pretty closely, and for the time they were in transit they were in loose association with their fellow citizens.

On the Arabian peninsula, the immigrants, not the citizens, take public transport. The citizens are very wealthy and drive nice cars and then interact with people in malls and restaurants in a strictly service relationship. Their “dense” interactions stay almost entirely within the tribe, which is to say the extended family. The Beirut-Tripoli mini-bus was not part of a service culture but a Servis culture: people working out a way to share a service and so bring the cost of it way down. The bus driver was not working for a company for a salary but paying what he had to pay for the bus, or the license to drive it, and working for himself, like a taxi driver.

We were driving along a beautiful coast, a fact that was probably more present to me than to the others on the bus, yet I am convinced that it was part of their experience as well. The fact is, no one lives in the region of Palestine, with all its troubles, and is not continually aware that naturally speaking it is a blessed land. As the bus made its way along the road, a continuously populated and trafficked stretch of coastline, I was thinking that through all the modern surface features what I was doing and witnessing was centuries old.  The corridor between these two major trading ports must always have been fairly active, more or less in this way.

At a certain point it became clear that the driver had gotten himself into a manhood-measuring contest with another, younger and more obviously macho mini-bus driver, who would overtake us, beeping and practically thumping his chest, only to be overtaken by our driver in turn. Our driver remained cheery to people inside the bus while hurling abuse at his rival every time he succeeded in passing him. In the end, we won, and I couldn’t help feeling proud of my guy, who was getting on in years but was tough as nails. He’s seen it all and wasn’t taking shit from anybody. For me, it’s a memory, one that makes me chuckle every time I think of it. And then I remember that he is doing much the same thing every day, even right now.

The mosque in front of my building is out of alignment with the buildings around it. Although I’ve been here four months, I am excited by it every time I look out my window. It looks like two grids crossing at an oblique angle, the articulated grid of the city and the grid implied by the four square walls of the mosque. But that is not what is happening. Mosques are not on a grid. They are in a radial pattern, all pointing to the Kaaba in Mecca. Wherever you are, you have to find the qibla, the direction of prayer. This is not easy to do, especially considering the curvature of the earth. Some early mosques miss the mark, a fascinating fact. That may be because they hadn’t yet sorted out the technicalities, or, as some argue, because they hadn’t agreed that the qibla should be focused on Mecca. For purely sentimental reasons I favor the former explanation. In any case, now it’s easy. You can go to a website and it will tell you how many degrees from north you should point yourself based on your current location.

“My” mosque is not simply set on a bias to the grid of the city. The fact of the divergence registers a more dynamic interaction. This building is being pulled out of alignment by a call to which the other buildings remain deaf.

The magnetism of mosques poses a contrast to the orientation of churches and constantly takes me by surprise. With some exceptions, the apses of churches point east. You can go so far east it becomes west, but churches keep pointing east. In the Middle Ages, the earthly paradise, the one Adam and Eve were kicked out of, was understood to be at the most easterly point on the earth. Churches proceed from the premise that as long as they are earthly they should point to the paradise that is known, in expectation of the one in heaven. Mosques also point to a known place, though it is true that the Black Stone embedded in one corner of the Kaaba is believed to have fallen from the sky in order to show Adam and Eve where to build the first altar, so in effect mosques point to an extraterrestrial body that has found a place on earth.

In any case, mosques point in different directions depending on where you are. In Abu Dhabi they point almost due west. But I got on a plane to Cairo and found them pointing north. A month later I was in Beirut, and found them pointing south. It was easy to see this in the Al Omari mosque because it is a converted church. The church was built by European crusaders in their version of Gothic and then taken over by the Mamluks after they kicked the crusaders out of the holy land in 1291. (See my earlier post about that.)

Al Omari mosque, Beirut

The carpet looks like it has been installed to align with the principal axis of the former church. But that is a coincidence produced by the fact that Mecca is directly south of here. Those bands on the carpet are guiding lines for the feet and knees of praying people. The man at the far end of the photo, standing in the former apse of the church, is in mid-prayer.

When you go to Istanbul, Mecca is to the east but not due east. It is south of east. This becomes clear when you look at, say, Kalenderhane, a Byzantine church that was converted into a mosque after the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The carpet sets out a very beautiful misalignment. It is a dramatic angle, but nothing so pedestrian and obvious as 45 degrees. It clearly expresses the fact that that sanctuary has been converted, with flair but no unnecessary drama. I would call it a jaunty divergence if it wasn’t very silly to say so. To me it seems that if the angle were any less or more it wouldn’t have quite this “absolute obliquity”–if there is such a concept.

Kalenderhane mosque, Istanbul

I was enjoying the fantastic coastline and the idea of looking out from the eastern dead end of the Mediterranean, straight out towards the Gibraltar strait at the other end. All those travelers who came from the West and were overjoyed to have reached these shores!

Then my friend Rasha explained its local significance: ”It’s a place where there is a diving competition organized by the thugs and the tough boys. And it’s a place where people commit suicide.”

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About 15 years ago, shortly before putting make up on me and making me wear glittery-archaic priestly garb and an outlandish hat in one of her films, my friend Gariné Torossian sat me down and had me watch films by the Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov, the fabricator of delirious fantasies in saturated texture and color. Outspoken and irreverent, though hardly a political player, he was imprisoned several times by the Soviet authorities and in various ways prevented from making all but a handful of films. His films are layered rather than linear, meditations rather than stories, collages unfolding through time, and so he found ways to continue creating under adverse conditions mostly by making assemblage art: cutting things up and putting them together, secreting new associations out of them. “A collage is a compressed film,” he famously said. He might also have said, a collage is a repressed film.

For that reason, and also because he was an irrepressible collector of wonderful junk (as well as beautiful nice things), a visit to the “home museum” of this artist is a particularly rich experience. The Kavafy museum in Alexandria is just a silent bore. The Parajanov museum (the contents of his Tbilisi home were moved to the house he was going to move into in Yerevan) is a loud, carnivalesque, intensely involving work. You just can’t understand his films until you witness his art emerging out of his home-bound contact with poetry in its potential state, which is more or less how he saw most things. Another reason I am compelled to pay attention to him and love him is that in certain photos, such as the one above, he looks uncannily like my father.

Here is a sampling of one sequence among the things to be seen in the home collection.

Chabrias, toujours préoccupé du juste culte à offrir aux dieux, s’inquiétait du progrès de sectes de ce genre [chrétien] dans la populace des grandes villes; il s’effrayait pour nos vieilles religions qui n’imposent à l’homme le joug d’aucun dogme, se prêtent à des interprétations aussi variées que la nature elle-même, et laissent les coeurs austères s’inventer s’ils le veulent une morale plus haute, sans astreindre les masses à des préceptes trop stricts pour ne pas engendrer aussitôt la contrainte et l’hypocrisie.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien.

(Courtesy of Anat Meruk.)

No matter how many churches you’ve visited, when you get to Armenia the realization settles: so this is what a church is supposed to be.

No side chapels, no side altars. No signs of private patronage. No parcelling. This is no Catholic church.

Katoghike Church, Yerevan

No frescoes or tapestries; the walls are bare. No iconostasis, no mosaics. This is no Orthodox church.

Harichavank

There is an image, but it is on the one altar. The reduction of image-stimulation is directly compensated for by long and incense-laden ritual. Masses last 2 hours. Forget reading, you sing. But this doesn’t mean it is more “rigorous.” The atmosphere is porous, accepting. People come in and out continually during mass.

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St. Hripsime

The chancel is a stage. It really is. It is raised, and it is reached by steps on either side. The curtain is drawn back and mass is sung. If there is no curtain, it is not a functioning church.

Marmashen

The churches are often on a centralized plan, meaning that they are about as long as they are wide. This is something one sees rarely in the Christian west but often in Byzantine lands. (They were doing it earlier and more consistently in Armenia, however.) But here there are no quincunx plans, with central dome and subsidiary domes, and in general the effect is less rounded and low than in Byzantine churches.

St. Hripsime

Armenian churches are fortresses, with high walls and high, pointed cupolas. Byzantine churches are glowing and sumptuous castles. Armenian churches are flinty, as if chiseled out of living stone. Their beauty is their solidity. They are made to withstand marauders, and earthquakes.

St. Hripsime

Marmashen is near the town of Gyumri, which was completely leveled by an earthquake in 1988. Here, some stones were nudged out of position, as you can see in the photo below. (You will notice that inside two of the arches the walls actually bevel inwards. Apparently that is a critical stabilizer against earthquake. You can see those features in St. Hripsime in the photo above as well. What look like niches are in fact negative wedges.)

Marmashen

The churches are very consistent and yet full of individual architectural ingenuity. Noravank puts the narthex underneath, rather than in front, of the main church. The stairs are scary to climb up (and especially to climb down!), but for the time you are up there you are in a perfect church, aloft amidst mountains and sky.

Noravank

I have always been very excited by mountains, and especially mountains in the immediate proximity of cities. I lived in Santiago, Chile until the age of 5, and though I have very few memories of it, something of the drama of the Andes rising up incredibly next to the city must have stayed with me. Mountains, especially near cities, seem to me animate, protecting beings. Sometimes, when a bank of clouds fills the sky above the horizon, I imagine that they are very high mountains looming impossibly close and I think, wouldn’t that be so exciting? It’s the best I can do in New York.

So I was happy when I landed in Yerevan, Armenia, and looked out my airplane window to see Ararat–so handsomely formed, so starkly set out, the Fuji of the West. I knew it was not far from Yerevan but had no idea that it rose up near the city like a presiding deity. But, almost as if to preserve its virtue, or to protect us from over-exposure to its power, or simply because such staggering things shouldn’t be too readily available, Ararat is most often shrouded in mist, its outlines only faintly visible.  What is barely discernible to the naked eye  becomes almost completely illegible in a photo. Here are some efforts I made. I swear it is there, in the middle of each shot.

Here it is peaking above the rooftops, from my hotel window. Armenians call it Masis. (That is “little Masis” to the left.) This was the clearest day I had, as it turns out.

Here it is from the steps of the National Library.

Here it is, from the Genocide Memorial, just outside the city.

Here it is behind the monastery of Khor Vrap, steps from the Turkish border.

I visited some amazing churches, but perhaps the most incredible of all, Zvartnots, is in ruins. It now looks like an Armenian Stonehenge, and its ring of colums is beautifully centered on Ararat. Take my word for it, it is right in the middle here, rising to the level of the column capitals!

And here, again take my word for it, it is towering high above the whole structure. (Click to enlarge, you’ll see.)

Locals say it is clearly set against a limpid sky only about 60 days out of the year.

Its appearing and disappearing quality, its Verschwindlichkeit, reminds one that when the waters receded after the great flood, it was the first land mass to appear. Or, more rationally, the fact that it is usually shrouded in a sea of mist may be what has compelled belief that this must be where Noah’s ark struck land.

On a more contemporary note, Ararat embodies what the Armenians lost to Turkey in the early part of the 20th century. They always say “our mountain” even though it is now, inconveniently, across the border. Always powerfully present, occasionally starkly visible, usually hovering at the threshold of invisibility, it is a fitting enough figure for memory itself.