We are staying at the Summer apartment of D’s childhood, in Eregli, on a bay of the Marmara sea, about an hour and a half from Istanbul. D—grew up in Izmit, a small city not far from here, which was close to the epicenter of the huge earthquake that killed tens of thousands of Turkish people maybe ten years ago. In Eregli, during that earthquake, only one building collapsed, taking with it the lives of one of D's friends from high school, the friend’s husband, and his entire immediate family. They were sitting on the balcony, eating, at the time.
Eregli, when D- was a child, was a remote and primitive fishing village. The only Summer residence was the apartment building we’re staying in, which was built as a collective project by her father and a group of his close friends and family. An architect relative designed the building, whose balconies all face west, so you can see the sunset from every apartment. The balconies are adjoining, and have rolling screens for privacy. When these are lifted, which they usually are, you can see and talk to all of the neighbors in either direction, which creates an effect something like watching television while looking into an infinitely reflecting set of mirrors. I have become friends with Iris, a four year old girl who lives two apartments over. From her open balcony-wall, when we are on our respective balconies at the same time, she displays all of her posessions one by one: a mirror, a toy pony, two seashells and a coloring book, for me and D- to admire.
Last night there was a village wedding, or circumcision party (we’re not sure which) at a restaurant across the street which is basically a wooden tent (like a big sukkah, for the Judeophiles out there) with a kitchen and fluorescent light-rods hung in the trees. We sat on a neighbor’s balcony with maybe ten people who have known D- since she was born (some of her parent’s generation, some contemporaries, and some of their children), listening to the gypsy music and Turkish folk songs coming from the restaurant. Somebody set off fireworks—big, impressive ones—on the beach and everyone came running, thinking it was gunfire.
A neighbor said that every time the villagers have one of these celebrations, there is a fight. People get drunk, and, inevitably, late in the evening, there is a dispute that ends in violence. Last night’s iteration was a little disappointing: around 11 pm some guy yelled something, and was thrown out of the party. He did a kind of face-saving stagger/strut down the road beneath out balcony, muttering to himself.
Here I am “the American.” People are very kind to me, and burst into peals of joyful laughter whenever I say anything in Turkish. Two nights ago, on our way to Eregli, we ate at the Summer house of the architect relative, Ghengis (“Cengiz” in Turkish. “Atila,” as in “Attila the Hun,” is also a common Turkish name…). His four year old grandson, who had a plastic lightsaber and Spiderman pyjamas, was scared of me because he thought I was Peter Parker, and because I'm foreign. While we ate dinner, he hid inside the house, burying his face in the couch. After dinner, I chased him around saying “The American is Coming!” in Turkish, in a Zombie voice, and we became great friends. He told me, with D- translating, the entire plot of “The Lion King III,” which I did not even know existed.
Eregli is an amazing place. Everybody knows everybody. The young kids, the teens, and the adults are all living their separate realities in full view of one another—the kids running around in packs, shouting, swimming, kicking balls around—the teens drinking, smoking, or just huddling around sullenly in groups of three or four on the beach. The adults sitting on balconies or in the backyards, talking, laughing, and drinking either alcohol or tea.
Last night, D- and I went to sit on a bench by the water, on an unlit stretch of beach. Under two trees behind us sat two groups of villagers at two tables, one for men and one for women (the women all wearing colorful headscarves, as they do), drinking raki (a grape and anise liquor—very much like Greek Ouzo). The men started singing a folk song with a lot of vibrato, one of them doing the stringed instrumental part with his voice, because they didn’t have any instruments. The song, D- told me, is sung by a man to a dark-haired woman who has rejected him, and basically says: “I have built bridges and fountains. Don’t think you’re so special.” And we, the audience, understand why the woman has rejected him.
Ours is no longer the only building on the block. The street is now lined with vacation apartments, delis, restaurants and “tea gardens” (outdoor tea places). The town still feels isolated, peaceful, and primitive, though—you see at least as many headscarf-wearing village women in the streets as you do Istanbul vacationers, and an American in Eregli is still an almost freakish oddity: A couple of teenagers in a tea garden asked me yesterday, incredulously, “why did you come here?”
This situation here is almost inconceivable to me, as an American and the product of a not-very-social suburban family——three generations of people, some of whom have known each other for thirty years, coming to the same place every Summer, watching each other and their children and their children’s children growing up. It is exactly like a huge, extended family. D- has not been here for eight years, yet she fell immediately back into the rhythm of the Eregli lifestyle, running from apartment to apartment to talk to people and to their relatives on the telephone, sitting outside with the “aunts” (the generic term of affection for any woman at least 20 years older than you. If she’s around your age, you call her “sister.”) talking about flowers and what everybody has been doing lately.
A guy just drove by selling peaches. Yesterday a guy drove by selling bleach. I couldn’t understand that. There are delis here—why do you need a mobile bleach salesman? My mother-in-law bought some bleach from him, which was a 20 minute process involving chatting and laughing with the guy so he would give her a better price. In Turkey, you must develop a personal relationship with the salesperson, or you get imperfect products at an unreasonable price. I have been told, by Turkish people, that trying to take advantage of others through trickery is a part of Turkish culture—that salespeople and customers alike delight in gaining the upper hand through small acts of deceit. Caveat Emptor.
A car just pulled up outside with a two year old boy at the wheel, steering, on his father’s lap. D- and some of the ladies are swimming. I think I might join them. So let me end with a story that my father-in-law told me last night—a kind of Turkish Zen koan about Nasrattin Hoja, a wise figure of legend who lived around 500 years ago.
Nasrattin Hoja was walking along the street when he saw two men fighting. He stepped in and pulled them apart. “What are you doing?” said one of the men. “You don’t know what this man has done! He has stolen my cow and insulted my mother!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. “Wait just a minute!” said the other man—“You haven’t heard my side of the story! This man is a liar!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. A third man, who had been standing nearby, witnessing these events, spoke up: “Nasrattin Hoja,” he said, “It is not possible that this man and that man can both be right!” Nasrattin Hoja considered this. “You are right, too,” he said.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Memoir—Summer “Exchanges” to Finland and France As An Impressionable Youth
Because I’m living right now in a kind of “insider’s” Turkey, I’ve been thinking a lot about two Summer experiences I had when I was an early teen—total immersions in foreign environments. When you’re living outside of your native country, you do a lot of thinking about yourself and how much of it is a product of your native environment—you make a lot of comparisons between where you come from and where you are, trying to figure out the differences, and probably also making a lot of mistakes—identifying as “cultural” tendencies that are specific to the individuals with whom you have contact. In any case, it is an experience of disorientation that sometimes, especially if you don’t know the language well, feels like being a child again, listening to and observing everything for clues as to what is really going on.
In the Summers after ninth and tenth grade I was sent on “exchange” to Finland and France, through a program that connected families with prospective young visitors from other countries. In reality, there was no “exchange”—a family just took you in for the Summer. Nor was there any special structure to the program—whatever the family did, you did.
In Finland I stayed in Helsinki with a family that claimed to be the second richest in the country. The father, who was originally Swedish, proudly drove me around his two underground parking garages (beneath downtown shopping malls). These were the only underground parking lots in Helsinki at the time, and brought him great wealth, with which he and his wife would travel around Europe, shopping.
For most of that Summer, they were abroad, shopping, leaving me and Sebastian, their son, in the care of two ancient grandparents who lived in the basement apartment with their equally ancient, mop-like dog. I believe that these were Sebastian’s father’s father and mother’s mother, who, having been widowed by their respective mates, had hit upon the convenient solution of becoming a couple themselves.
The house was a five-story, rectangular, wood-faced structure like an apartment building (which it may originally have been). Sebastian (or “Seba,” as he was called) and I lived on the top floor and almost never saw the grandparents. Occasionally the grandmother would come up in the elevator to check on us, calling out “Se-e-b-a-a!” “Se-e-b-a-a!” while I hid in my bedroom, for fear of having to talk to her in my very limited French (she spoke Finnish and French, but not English). We saw her maybe three times the whole Summer.
Seba and I were, I guess, around 14 years old. He was more experienced than I was in the ways of bad kid-ness, probably because kids in Helsinki, from the age of around 10, begin spending their evenings and weekends gathering in large, asphalt youth-parks, with maybe 100 other youths aged 10-18, drinking and skateboarding around.
All of Seba’s friends were from the projects of Helsinki, and in addition to drinking and skateboarding while listening to the Beastie Boys, they liked to break into these octagonal kiosks that are all over the city and steal candy and money.
The first three things I was ok with: I drank a lot of Carlsberg and Elephant beer that Summer, created elaborate grip-tape designs (spider web with spider for myself, and Marijuana leaf with Playboy Bunny for Seba, at his request) for two skateboards that Seba and I would use to skate all over Helsinki, listened to the Beastie Boys on somebody’s boom box that had been painted pink, and whose speakers had stolen VW symbols affixed to them, and enjoyed Seba’s father’s sauna, swimming pool, projection tv and vast collection of VHS films to the fullest.
I drew the line, however (for some reason), at breaking into kiosks, which was done by climbing on top of them and opening the roof-panel. On those occasions when Seba and friends would decide to knock over a kiosk, I would politely excuse myself and walk home. I can’t clearly recall my thoughts at the time, but I think I knew it was “wrong” and was scared of ending up in a Finnish jail and being bailed out (or being unable to be bailed out) by my furious parents.
One evening, early in the Summer, Seba and I were in the youth park with a bottle of Gin. I had never tasted Gin before, but this did not daunt me from drinking half a bottle while sitting on a bench, talking to random Finnish teens about America. When a third of the bottle was empty, I announced to all the girls who were present that in America, all girls want to sleep with me, and suggested that they might like to do the same. When half of the bottle was gone, I vomited, rolled off the bench, and lay there, where I remained until Seba and a group of his friends grew tired of the youth park and carried me home. Somebody gave me a bath and put me to bed.
The next morning I awoke to find Seba leaning over my bed, grinning and holding out a cup, which I took and drained. The contents, it turned out, had been 120 proof rum from South America, which Seba claimed would instantly cure my hangover, which I guess it did. I then walked out into the hallway, where many Finnish youths were sleeping or slowly waking up, Seba’s parents being in France or somewhere. They all leered knowingly at me and I knew, although I could not remember anything, that I must have made a complete idiot of myself.
It is a testament to my good sense that I did not drink myself into oblivion ever again that Summer, and to the good sense of my stomach that I couldn’t touch Gin for maybe a decade after that night.
Seba’s family (like all Finnish, middle and upper-middle class families) had a Summer house about an hour’s drive north of Helsinki (I forget the name of the town). We went there once or twice during the Summer when his parents were back in town and stayed for a couple of days each time. I remember the place as a woodland Paradise, where Seba’s grandma made the best sausages and bread I have ever tasted. These we ate hot out of the oven with a delicious, sweet-hot Finnish mustard from a tube (which I have often thought of but have never seen since that Summer).
About thirty feet from the house there was a wooden sauna and a lake. The men and the women of the household would use the sauna in shifts, for modesty’s sake, stripping naked and turning beet red as somebody poured water onto the burning coals and the little wooden house was filled with steam and the spicy smell of seasoned wood (from the fire below the coals). When you had become as red as you could endure being, you would run, naked, out of the sauna-house and jump into the cold lake. Every nerve in your body would then experience a kind of screaming momentary epiphany, leaving you energized, calm and focused. Then you would repeat the process all over again.
Seba’s family also had a motorboat on that lake, and they put me in a wetsuit and taught me to waterski. I picked up the basics after four or five attempts, and was happily upright and skiing around the lake for the rest of that day.
There was also a girl there—a cousin of the family, I think, with whom I would lie in the sun on a rock and hold hands. She did not speak English and I didn’t know any Finnish. Seba made a lot of fun of me for this mini-relationship, because he thought the girl was ugly.
There were other things too—side trips to Denmark (with the family) and to Leningrad (with the exchange organization), but what I remember most vividly is being a kid on my own, with Seba, skating around, drinking, eating pancakes, and living as free as any kid could wish to be from the (perhaps not unwisely) oppressive rules and requirements of grown-ups. All told, I survived pretty well without any supervision, and learned some things about my own resilience and limits that I couldn’t have learned at home.
Simultaneously, though I was only dimly aware of the fact, my sister was in the early stages of diagnosis of a cancer that would almost kill her that Fall, and would leave her with a prosthetic knee-joint. In retrospect, I think this was my parents’ main motivation for sending me away.
France, the following Summer, was a completely different experience. My host family, who lived in Paris, were a couple in their mid-sixties. The man was retired from the World Bank, skeletally thin, possessed of a long, wispy beard, and very serious about Astrology, which he practiced with elaborate, detailed charts and maps, casting the futures not only of friends and relatives, but of whole nations and Humanity itself. For most of the Summer he sat in a chair, smoking unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes, reading his way through the Complete Works of Freud in eight or ten volumes. He said almost nothing to me the whole Summer, aside from offering once to read my future, which I refused because it (and he) scared me.
That Summer, for me, was mostly about reading. I spent a lot of time alone, reading Big Books and feeling deep, vague stirrings of meaningfulness. I “read” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (from which I understood and felt only a dark and primitive sense of ancient, scary impulses), Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (from which I understood nothing at all), and The Lord of the Rings (the book I understood best and enjoyed most that Summer). I also watched (in French) the movie “Le Grand Bleu” (“The Big Blue”) about an air-tankless competitive diver with an almost mystical relationship with the sea, which, along with Lord of the Rings inspired me to write sprawling, pompous metaphysical poems which I would send to my then-girlfriend, who had moved to Kentucky that Summer for good.
My host mother was more talkative and physically energetic than her husband, and she would involve me in all kinds of physical activities, especially when we were staying in their family’s ancient “chateau” in the South of France. We spent most of the Summer in that house, which was built in the 1600’s and was really more like a one-story monastery than what I think of as a chateau. The walls were made of cool, smooth, white stone and bore old wooden crosses. All around the place was the vineyard country of Savoie, where Vins de Table are produced—miles and miles in every direction of rolling hills covered with rows of grapevines, with the occasional white house in the middle of them. Nearby, on one side, were the French Alps, separating France and Italy. Every Friday a farmer would come to the house in a wagon, bringing a big wheel of cheese (usually “Tomme De Savoie”—a semi-soft, musty, delicious cow’s milk cheese), fresh bread and eggs, and a cherry tart.
The rest of the time, the couple (and I) ate 1) wheat bread spread with vegetable lard and sprinkled with flaked yeast and 2) brown rice. That was pretty much it. As a result of this diet, and the fact that the mother was always making me hike and bike to the point of nervous collapse, I was always in a state of semi-starvation, and would frequently sneak into the kitchen at night (in between chapters of Lord of the Rings) to steal delicious savory biscuits—crumbly, salty, buttery boxed crackers with burnt edges. I stole so many of these that, on my departure at the end of the Summer, the mother gave me two boxes to take home with me.
The physical component of the Summer involved mainly hiking and biking. My host mother was in incredible shape, and would ride or hike for long distances, very fast, without the slightest sign of fatigue. I, on the other hand, was a pathetic, soft, non-athletic kid who began each excursion panting and sweating, and ended up almost always in tears, saying (in French) “it’s too much!” “take me home!” “I’m dying!” The French cast a cold ear on such complaints, basically ignoring them altogether.
One time, on the way back from a biking trip, I either rode ahead or fell behind and got lost. I ended up in a tiny wine-country village, and went into a restaurant to ask for help. I told the owner the names of my host parents, he found them in the phone book, and they came to rescue me.
The main difference between the French Summer and the Finnish one was that, in France, I was living the solitary, alienated existence of a little Hamlet or Young Werther, very conscious of my own identity as a young intellectual/mystic, penetrating the realms of the inner consciousness, and the mysteries of Philosophy and the Ocean. My daytime identity, by contrast, was that of the solitary, alienated Pathetic Wimp, being dragged, whimpering, all over the countryside. In both cases, I had no companions of my own age, and could not really relate in any way to my host parents, who were old and very weird people.
In Finland, on the other hand, my life was outward-directed. I was constantly interacting with other people, people my own age, and doing exactly whatever I wanted to do. Actually, I had a great time in both places. France was strange but exciting: I was opening up to a kind of isolated, personal, intellectual life that was new and mysterious to me. I felt misunderstood, and I kind of liked it, because I was coming to a new kind of understanding of myself as distinct from (and ultimately, inaccessible to) other people. In Finland, self and identity were not really at issue, because I was constantly involved in some kind of social activity. There was no separation between myself and other people because from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and sleep was rare that Summer, with only two or three hours of darkness per night) I was part of a Group (almost a gang, come to think of it, what with all the theft).
The structure of this piece feels like it is pressuring me into deriving some kind of cutesy lesson from all of this. My fault—I have a tendency to fall into these kinds of fascistic narrative structures that leave me, at the end, rebelling against the corner I’ve painted myself into: “Finland and France: Two Contrasting Lessons in Extroverted and Introverted Living.”
No lessons, please. At the end of the Finland trip, Seba’s parents took us to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, which is a kind of outdoor park with lots of stores, flowers and ferris wheels. Many of the stores there sell handmade pipes and tobacco. I bought a little pipe on a keychain and some tobacco to smoke in it. As I was packing to go home, it suddenly hit me that, in America, I would not be able to wander around with my friends, smoking this pipe. That, in fact, if I brought the pipe home, I would be in Big Trouble. With deep regret, I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in the room I was staying in, underneath a pile of old, unused, miscellaneous things. It’s probably still there.
In the Summers after ninth and tenth grade I was sent on “exchange” to Finland and France, through a program that connected families with prospective young visitors from other countries. In reality, there was no “exchange”—a family just took you in for the Summer. Nor was there any special structure to the program—whatever the family did, you did.
In Finland I stayed in Helsinki with a family that claimed to be the second richest in the country. The father, who was originally Swedish, proudly drove me around his two underground parking garages (beneath downtown shopping malls). These were the only underground parking lots in Helsinki at the time, and brought him great wealth, with which he and his wife would travel around Europe, shopping.
For most of that Summer, they were abroad, shopping, leaving me and Sebastian, their son, in the care of two ancient grandparents who lived in the basement apartment with their equally ancient, mop-like dog. I believe that these were Sebastian’s father’s father and mother’s mother, who, having been widowed by their respective mates, had hit upon the convenient solution of becoming a couple themselves.
The house was a five-story, rectangular, wood-faced structure like an apartment building (which it may originally have been). Sebastian (or “Seba,” as he was called) and I lived on the top floor and almost never saw the grandparents. Occasionally the grandmother would come up in the elevator to check on us, calling out “Se-e-b-a-a!” “Se-e-b-a-a!” while I hid in my bedroom, for fear of having to talk to her in my very limited French (she spoke Finnish and French, but not English). We saw her maybe three times the whole Summer.
Seba and I were, I guess, around 14 years old. He was more experienced than I was in the ways of bad kid-ness, probably because kids in Helsinki, from the age of around 10, begin spending their evenings and weekends gathering in large, asphalt youth-parks, with maybe 100 other youths aged 10-18, drinking and skateboarding around.
All of Seba’s friends were from the projects of Helsinki, and in addition to drinking and skateboarding while listening to the Beastie Boys, they liked to break into these octagonal kiosks that are all over the city and steal candy and money.
The first three things I was ok with: I drank a lot of Carlsberg and Elephant beer that Summer, created elaborate grip-tape designs (spider web with spider for myself, and Marijuana leaf with Playboy Bunny for Seba, at his request) for two skateboards that Seba and I would use to skate all over Helsinki, listened to the Beastie Boys on somebody’s boom box that had been painted pink, and whose speakers had stolen VW symbols affixed to them, and enjoyed Seba’s father’s sauna, swimming pool, projection tv and vast collection of VHS films to the fullest.
I drew the line, however (for some reason), at breaking into kiosks, which was done by climbing on top of them and opening the roof-panel. On those occasions when Seba and friends would decide to knock over a kiosk, I would politely excuse myself and walk home. I can’t clearly recall my thoughts at the time, but I think I knew it was “wrong” and was scared of ending up in a Finnish jail and being bailed out (or being unable to be bailed out) by my furious parents.
One evening, early in the Summer, Seba and I were in the youth park with a bottle of Gin. I had never tasted Gin before, but this did not daunt me from drinking half a bottle while sitting on a bench, talking to random Finnish teens about America. When a third of the bottle was empty, I announced to all the girls who were present that in America, all girls want to sleep with me, and suggested that they might like to do the same. When half of the bottle was gone, I vomited, rolled off the bench, and lay there, where I remained until Seba and a group of his friends grew tired of the youth park and carried me home. Somebody gave me a bath and put me to bed.
The next morning I awoke to find Seba leaning over my bed, grinning and holding out a cup, which I took and drained. The contents, it turned out, had been 120 proof rum from South America, which Seba claimed would instantly cure my hangover, which I guess it did. I then walked out into the hallway, where many Finnish youths were sleeping or slowly waking up, Seba’s parents being in France or somewhere. They all leered knowingly at me and I knew, although I could not remember anything, that I must have made a complete idiot of myself.
It is a testament to my good sense that I did not drink myself into oblivion ever again that Summer, and to the good sense of my stomach that I couldn’t touch Gin for maybe a decade after that night.
Seba’s family (like all Finnish, middle and upper-middle class families) had a Summer house about an hour’s drive north of Helsinki (I forget the name of the town). We went there once or twice during the Summer when his parents were back in town and stayed for a couple of days each time. I remember the place as a woodland Paradise, where Seba’s grandma made the best sausages and bread I have ever tasted. These we ate hot out of the oven with a delicious, sweet-hot Finnish mustard from a tube (which I have often thought of but have never seen since that Summer).
About thirty feet from the house there was a wooden sauna and a lake. The men and the women of the household would use the sauna in shifts, for modesty’s sake, stripping naked and turning beet red as somebody poured water onto the burning coals and the little wooden house was filled with steam and the spicy smell of seasoned wood (from the fire below the coals). When you had become as red as you could endure being, you would run, naked, out of the sauna-house and jump into the cold lake. Every nerve in your body would then experience a kind of screaming momentary epiphany, leaving you energized, calm and focused. Then you would repeat the process all over again.
Seba’s family also had a motorboat on that lake, and they put me in a wetsuit and taught me to waterski. I picked up the basics after four or five attempts, and was happily upright and skiing around the lake for the rest of that day.
There was also a girl there—a cousin of the family, I think, with whom I would lie in the sun on a rock and hold hands. She did not speak English and I didn’t know any Finnish. Seba made a lot of fun of me for this mini-relationship, because he thought the girl was ugly.
There were other things too—side trips to Denmark (with the family) and to Leningrad (with the exchange organization), but what I remember most vividly is being a kid on my own, with Seba, skating around, drinking, eating pancakes, and living as free as any kid could wish to be from the (perhaps not unwisely) oppressive rules and requirements of grown-ups. All told, I survived pretty well without any supervision, and learned some things about my own resilience and limits that I couldn’t have learned at home.
Simultaneously, though I was only dimly aware of the fact, my sister was in the early stages of diagnosis of a cancer that would almost kill her that Fall, and would leave her with a prosthetic knee-joint. In retrospect, I think this was my parents’ main motivation for sending me away.
France, the following Summer, was a completely different experience. My host family, who lived in Paris, were a couple in their mid-sixties. The man was retired from the World Bank, skeletally thin, possessed of a long, wispy beard, and very serious about Astrology, which he practiced with elaborate, detailed charts and maps, casting the futures not only of friends and relatives, but of whole nations and Humanity itself. For most of the Summer he sat in a chair, smoking unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes, reading his way through the Complete Works of Freud in eight or ten volumes. He said almost nothing to me the whole Summer, aside from offering once to read my future, which I refused because it (and he) scared me.
That Summer, for me, was mostly about reading. I spent a lot of time alone, reading Big Books and feeling deep, vague stirrings of meaningfulness. I “read” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (from which I understood and felt only a dark and primitive sense of ancient, scary impulses), Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (from which I understood nothing at all), and The Lord of the Rings (the book I understood best and enjoyed most that Summer). I also watched (in French) the movie “Le Grand Bleu” (“The Big Blue”) about an air-tankless competitive diver with an almost mystical relationship with the sea, which, along with Lord of the Rings inspired me to write sprawling, pompous metaphysical poems which I would send to my then-girlfriend, who had moved to Kentucky that Summer for good.
My host mother was more talkative and physically energetic than her husband, and she would involve me in all kinds of physical activities, especially when we were staying in their family’s ancient “chateau” in the South of France. We spent most of the Summer in that house, which was built in the 1600’s and was really more like a one-story monastery than what I think of as a chateau. The walls were made of cool, smooth, white stone and bore old wooden crosses. All around the place was the vineyard country of Savoie, where Vins de Table are produced—miles and miles in every direction of rolling hills covered with rows of grapevines, with the occasional white house in the middle of them. Nearby, on one side, were the French Alps, separating France and Italy. Every Friday a farmer would come to the house in a wagon, bringing a big wheel of cheese (usually “Tomme De Savoie”—a semi-soft, musty, delicious cow’s milk cheese), fresh bread and eggs, and a cherry tart.
The rest of the time, the couple (and I) ate 1) wheat bread spread with vegetable lard and sprinkled with flaked yeast and 2) brown rice. That was pretty much it. As a result of this diet, and the fact that the mother was always making me hike and bike to the point of nervous collapse, I was always in a state of semi-starvation, and would frequently sneak into the kitchen at night (in between chapters of Lord of the Rings) to steal delicious savory biscuits—crumbly, salty, buttery boxed crackers with burnt edges. I stole so many of these that, on my departure at the end of the Summer, the mother gave me two boxes to take home with me.
The physical component of the Summer involved mainly hiking and biking. My host mother was in incredible shape, and would ride or hike for long distances, very fast, without the slightest sign of fatigue. I, on the other hand, was a pathetic, soft, non-athletic kid who began each excursion panting and sweating, and ended up almost always in tears, saying (in French) “it’s too much!” “take me home!” “I’m dying!” The French cast a cold ear on such complaints, basically ignoring them altogether.
One time, on the way back from a biking trip, I either rode ahead or fell behind and got lost. I ended up in a tiny wine-country village, and went into a restaurant to ask for help. I told the owner the names of my host parents, he found them in the phone book, and they came to rescue me.
The main difference between the French Summer and the Finnish one was that, in France, I was living the solitary, alienated existence of a little Hamlet or Young Werther, very conscious of my own identity as a young intellectual/mystic, penetrating the realms of the inner consciousness, and the mysteries of Philosophy and the Ocean. My daytime identity, by contrast, was that of the solitary, alienated Pathetic Wimp, being dragged, whimpering, all over the countryside. In both cases, I had no companions of my own age, and could not really relate in any way to my host parents, who were old and very weird people.
In Finland, on the other hand, my life was outward-directed. I was constantly interacting with other people, people my own age, and doing exactly whatever I wanted to do. Actually, I had a great time in both places. France was strange but exciting: I was opening up to a kind of isolated, personal, intellectual life that was new and mysterious to me. I felt misunderstood, and I kind of liked it, because I was coming to a new kind of understanding of myself as distinct from (and ultimately, inaccessible to) other people. In Finland, self and identity were not really at issue, because I was constantly involved in some kind of social activity. There was no separation between myself and other people because from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and sleep was rare that Summer, with only two or three hours of darkness per night) I was part of a Group (almost a gang, come to think of it, what with all the theft).
The structure of this piece feels like it is pressuring me into deriving some kind of cutesy lesson from all of this. My fault—I have a tendency to fall into these kinds of fascistic narrative structures that leave me, at the end, rebelling against the corner I’ve painted myself into: “Finland and France: Two Contrasting Lessons in Extroverted and Introverted Living.”
No lessons, please. At the end of the Finland trip, Seba’s parents took us to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, which is a kind of outdoor park with lots of stores, flowers and ferris wheels. Many of the stores there sell handmade pipes and tobacco. I bought a little pipe on a keychain and some tobacco to smoke in it. As I was packing to go home, it suddenly hit me that, in America, I would not be able to wander around with my friends, smoking this pipe. That, in fact, if I brought the pipe home, I would be in Big Trouble. With deep regret, I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in the room I was staying in, underneath a pile of old, unused, miscellaneous things. It’s probably still there.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Turkish Drivers and the Concept of Risk
Do not attempt to drive in Istanbul. Do not attempt even to cross the street. To say that Turkish drivers are insane would be a fantastical understatement. If Turkish drivers could somehow induce their cars to drive up lampposts, the sides of buildings, human flesh, trees, the air…if they could drive straight upwards, out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into the heart of the Sun, they would do so without hesitation. They simply do not care. There are rules, laws and police, but somehow they do not adhere to actual people in actual cars. This may be because the police, when they appear, restrict their role mainly to shouting authoritatively into a megaphone, barking commands like: “Stop talking on that cellphone and drive!” Also, all traffic police are bribe-able, so in the event that a driver is stopped for, say, running a red light while driving on the sidewalk, 50 lira (about $30) will usually put him back on the right side of the law.
People say that New York drivers are crazy. New York drivers are not crazy. They will, for example, stop if a person enters the road in front of them. Here, the pedestrian does not have the right of way, and if you should die under the wheels of a taxi, the taxi driver’s conscience will not be disturbed, because you are the idiot that stepped out in front of him. Seriously. It is NOT his problem.
You can cross the street in front of cars if, and only if, you are in a very busy, heavily trafficked area where the cars are moving slowly and there are a lot of pedestrians. In that case, there is a kind of uneasy negotiation between walkers and drivers—an edgy détente of sorts in which cars nudge forward and people nudge across, almost, but not quite bumping into each other.
Turkish drivers will, and frequently do, drive the wrong way on a one-way road. My father-in-law, while doing this, explained to me: “In Turkey, we can do this, if it is only for a short distance. In America it is not possible. Turkish people like risk.”
Indeed. Turkish people seem to like risk almost as much as Americans dislike it. One huge cultural difference between Turkey and America is that, in America, the legal system—more specifically, the litigation system—works very very well, whereas in Turkey it is almost non-existent. This is the reason that it is possible, in America, to have a sign on the wall at a public swimming pool that reads: “Management is not responsible for the discoloration of swimming suits due to chlorinated water.”
In Turkey, on the other hand, you are free to injure or destroy yourself in any manner that suits you. Should you wish, for example, to burn a heap of explosive solvents in your front yard, or fumigate your livingroom with gaseous clouds of poisonous insecticide, you are free to do so. Should you die in the process, Turkish society will mourn your passing as a regrettable but inevitable twist of fate. “Ah, what can you do?,” they will say. “He was a good man…but this Summer was so damp, and there were so many mosquitoes…The climate was not like this when we were children…”
As an American in Turkey, I have mixed emotions about this risk-oblivious culture. What I like about it is the freedom. In America, elaborate safety precautions stand between you and everything fun. It sometimes feels like you are living your life inside a giant condom. The thing is, you want the freedom for yourself, because you know you are trustworthy, but not for the other guy, because the other guy can kill you. That’s the dilemma. There’s a lot of unwarranted trust in Turkey, and a lot of unwarranted paranoia in the States...
At any rate, I implore you: stay off the roads in Turkey. Take planes, boats, balloons, whatever—but do not drive or try to cross the street. If you have ever seen “Road Warrior,” or “Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome,” you have some idea what it is like. Remember Mel Gibson, clad in black leather, shooting at improvised jeeps with an improvised bazooka. Remember the molten, smoking heaps of twisted metal fulminating by the roadside. Think of the massive, wizened-headed vultures hunching over the carcasses of those who were not Man or Mad enough to survive that apocalyptic highway and you will understand that you are better off staying at home…
People say that New York drivers are crazy. New York drivers are not crazy. They will, for example, stop if a person enters the road in front of them. Here, the pedestrian does not have the right of way, and if you should die under the wheels of a taxi, the taxi driver’s conscience will not be disturbed, because you are the idiot that stepped out in front of him. Seriously. It is NOT his problem.
You can cross the street in front of cars if, and only if, you are in a very busy, heavily trafficked area where the cars are moving slowly and there are a lot of pedestrians. In that case, there is a kind of uneasy negotiation between walkers and drivers—an edgy détente of sorts in which cars nudge forward and people nudge across, almost, but not quite bumping into each other.
Turkish drivers will, and frequently do, drive the wrong way on a one-way road. My father-in-law, while doing this, explained to me: “In Turkey, we can do this, if it is only for a short distance. In America it is not possible. Turkish people like risk.”
Indeed. Turkish people seem to like risk almost as much as Americans dislike it. One huge cultural difference between Turkey and America is that, in America, the legal system—more specifically, the litigation system—works very very well, whereas in Turkey it is almost non-existent. This is the reason that it is possible, in America, to have a sign on the wall at a public swimming pool that reads: “Management is not responsible for the discoloration of swimming suits due to chlorinated water.”
In Turkey, on the other hand, you are free to injure or destroy yourself in any manner that suits you. Should you wish, for example, to burn a heap of explosive solvents in your front yard, or fumigate your livingroom with gaseous clouds of poisonous insecticide, you are free to do so. Should you die in the process, Turkish society will mourn your passing as a regrettable but inevitable twist of fate. “Ah, what can you do?,” they will say. “He was a good man…but this Summer was so damp, and there were so many mosquitoes…The climate was not like this when we were children…”
As an American in Turkey, I have mixed emotions about this risk-oblivious culture. What I like about it is the freedom. In America, elaborate safety precautions stand between you and everything fun. It sometimes feels like you are living your life inside a giant condom. The thing is, you want the freedom for yourself, because you know you are trustworthy, but not for the other guy, because the other guy can kill you. That’s the dilemma. There’s a lot of unwarranted trust in Turkey, and a lot of unwarranted paranoia in the States...
At any rate, I implore you: stay off the roads in Turkey. Take planes, boats, balloons, whatever—but do not drive or try to cross the street. If you have ever seen “Road Warrior,” or “Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome,” you have some idea what it is like. Remember Mel Gibson, clad in black leather, shooting at improvised jeeps with an improvised bazooka. Remember the molten, smoking heaps of twisted metal fulminating by the roadside. Think of the massive, wizened-headed vultures hunching over the carcasses of those who were not Man or Mad enough to survive that apocalyptic highway and you will understand that you are better off staying at home…
En Buyuk, Turkiye!! ("Turkey, the Greatest!!")
It is a week since I arrived at Attaturk International Airport, bedraggled and road-begrimed, and managed to recover the (very big) mini-pool table (a wedding gift) I had checked as luggage by asking the first official-looking guy I saw, in Turkish: “Where is the big cardboard box?” Whenever I manage to use Turkish successfully, it feels like I have performed a magical incantation, putting a string of sounds together and making a dragon or lightning appear out of the air.
We are staying at my brother-in-law’s apartment, which has a mind-boggling view of the Bosphorous. From the balcony you can see a mile-wide swath of outrageously blue water with boats of all sorts, from giant Russian tankers to megayachts to tiny sailboats, drifting peacefully along at all hours of day and night. Across the channel, which is maybe half a mile wide, you see the low, rolling hills on the Asian side of Istanbul, covered with fuzzy, round trees that look like piñons from here, and the red, clay roofs of low, whitewashed apartment buildings.
Waking up in the morning and sitting on this balcony with tea or coffee, you feel like you are floating in golden, sparkly fairy-clouds of benevolence and peacefulness. Like the world wishes nothing for you but contentment and happiness forever.
My brother-in-law’s apartment is situated in the middle of a very unusual Istanbul neighborhood. Surrounding his small apartment building are dwellings of varying degrees of architectural soundness, made by squatters from Eastern Turkey who, because they have been here so long (30 or 40 years, in some cases) and constitute an important voting constituency for local politicians, have not only been allowed to remain, but have been provided by the State with telephone service, electricity and running water. Still, there is a strong “village” atmosphere here. Our immediate neighbors, for example, have a rooster that crows all day, calling and responding to another, faraway rooster. I have been trying to figure out what they are saying to each other—that is, what a rooster has to gain from contacting another rooster in this way. The best I can figure is that they are telling each other “stay out of my territory!” The neighbors are also collecting “dut” (white mulberries?) from trees in their yard with blanket-nets, and growing many fruits and vegetables.
My first or second night here, we met “Maryam,” a charming and confident eight-year-old neighbor girl, who came by to collect the rent for her mother (the landlady) and stayed to chat with us on the porch. She told us (in Turkish) that she is very curious about America and would love to visit it sometime, but that she has to go to Qu’aran school this Summer. I taught her a few words in English, which she continued repeating to herself over and over as she walked down the stairs toward home.
This morning there was a regatta on the Bosphorous—dozens of small sailboats gathering in preparation, it seemed for a race. I slept like the dead last night, because the last few days have been a Job-like whirlwind of visits with friends and family—the most surreal being last night’s—um—event. First of all let me say that Turkish culture is much less formal than American culture is about social plans. People just drop by. An intimate dinner can quickly turn into a massive potluck feast. Last night we were supposed to be having dinner with Demet’s cousin and his fiancée. We brought two bottles of wine, looking forward to a quiet evening of food and conversation, and to getting to know the fiancée a little better.
We entered their apartment and were greeted by eleven members of the fiancee’s family: mother, brother, uncle, and cousins. Chairs were arranged in the living room in a great circle as if for a community meeting or civic welcoming banquet. Tables were laid out and groaning under the weight of fifteen or twenty traditional and very elaborate Turkish entrees and desserts, all prepared by the fiancee’s mother.
The room was white, the lights bright and threatening. We sat in a circle, all thirteen of us, looking at each other. Somebody asked me in English about teaching—whether I like it, what I like about it. Two people discoursed, at length, in Turkish, about Modern versus Classical art. At one point I played and sang Pogues songs and “Stagger Lee” for everybody on a guitar, and the uncle played a classical Ottoman song. At eleven, everybody got up and left.
I still have no idea what it was all about—why all those people were there. D—says that it wasn’t because we were in town from America—that it was a surprise even to her cousin, who had also expected a quiet, intimate dinner. Something about how the uncle is in town, and is leaving for Ankara tomorrow and people wanted to give him a nice sendoff. I must have looked very stunned for the first hour or so after arriving, because the predominant thought in my brain was “Where am I? What is happening?” Like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…Do you, Mr. Jones?” No. Mr. Gots did not know what was happening. He just tried to smile and look harmless—an American appreciative of Turkish hospitality.
At the party I saw D-s cousin’s husband, who is a modern artist (of some international fame) and one of the more unique personalities I have ever encountered. I have met him twice before, at our engagement party in Turkey and at our wedding. He does not speak English and I do not speak Turkish, but somehow we always end up spending hours talking to each other. D- says that she does not understand what he is saying even in Turkish, so abstract and strange is his manner of speaking. In English, he says things like: “The box! Symbolic!” and then, when you ask what he means, repeats them, nodding. Yesterday he told me that he has it on authority from his friend in the Swedish Parliament that Bob Dylan is an International Spy. He wants to make films for a couple of my instrumental tracks and to publish a Turkish-themed comic I have invented but not yet written in his new online Zine (called “E-Benzine,” I think). According to D--, although he is frequently incomprehensible, he is incredibly confident and productive—constantly at work on film, painting, and installation projects, of which he has completed hundreds, if not thousands. His website (www.simulasyon.net) describes his work (in English) as follows:
“Simulation of my production was formed through creating inflation of installation in works which may be based as vanishing art. My works were built upon understanding to understand (commenting on meaning--Hermaneutics) in the present form.
Seek of art here involves a deep ‘reconstruction’ process in the context of forming relation between the inspected and inspecting devices and research purposes.
Interdisciplinary—intermethodical relationships were formed. It is based upon forming new perception systems by fastening the vanishing process of the art.”
Notwithstanding a few translation-related grammatical errors, this is, D—tells me, pretty much what it says in the Turkish version.
After a week’s worth of living, eating, visiting and struggling to understand Turkish, it is strange and wonderful to be writing in English again. If the past week has been any indication, it will be difficult to maintain any kind of regular schedule with this blog while I am in Turkey, but I will post as frequently as I am able, and record the highlights and the lowlights of the Summer’s experiences. Hadi gorusuruz…
We are staying at my brother-in-law’s apartment, which has a mind-boggling view of the Bosphorous. From the balcony you can see a mile-wide swath of outrageously blue water with boats of all sorts, from giant Russian tankers to megayachts to tiny sailboats, drifting peacefully along at all hours of day and night. Across the channel, which is maybe half a mile wide, you see the low, rolling hills on the Asian side of Istanbul, covered with fuzzy, round trees that look like piñons from here, and the red, clay roofs of low, whitewashed apartment buildings.
Waking up in the morning and sitting on this balcony with tea or coffee, you feel like you are floating in golden, sparkly fairy-clouds of benevolence and peacefulness. Like the world wishes nothing for you but contentment and happiness forever.
My brother-in-law’s apartment is situated in the middle of a very unusual Istanbul neighborhood. Surrounding his small apartment building are dwellings of varying degrees of architectural soundness, made by squatters from Eastern Turkey who, because they have been here so long (30 or 40 years, in some cases) and constitute an important voting constituency for local politicians, have not only been allowed to remain, but have been provided by the State with telephone service, electricity and running water. Still, there is a strong “village” atmosphere here. Our immediate neighbors, for example, have a rooster that crows all day, calling and responding to another, faraway rooster. I have been trying to figure out what they are saying to each other—that is, what a rooster has to gain from contacting another rooster in this way. The best I can figure is that they are telling each other “stay out of my territory!” The neighbors are also collecting “dut” (white mulberries?) from trees in their yard with blanket-nets, and growing many fruits and vegetables.
My first or second night here, we met “Maryam,” a charming and confident eight-year-old neighbor girl, who came by to collect the rent for her mother (the landlady) and stayed to chat with us on the porch. She told us (in Turkish) that she is very curious about America and would love to visit it sometime, but that she has to go to Qu’aran school this Summer. I taught her a few words in English, which she continued repeating to herself over and over as she walked down the stairs toward home.
This morning there was a regatta on the Bosphorous—dozens of small sailboats gathering in preparation, it seemed for a race. I slept like the dead last night, because the last few days have been a Job-like whirlwind of visits with friends and family—the most surreal being last night’s—um—event. First of all let me say that Turkish culture is much less formal than American culture is about social plans. People just drop by. An intimate dinner can quickly turn into a massive potluck feast. Last night we were supposed to be having dinner with Demet’s cousin and his fiancée. We brought two bottles of wine, looking forward to a quiet evening of food and conversation, and to getting to know the fiancée a little better.
We entered their apartment and were greeted by eleven members of the fiancee’s family: mother, brother, uncle, and cousins. Chairs were arranged in the living room in a great circle as if for a community meeting or civic welcoming banquet. Tables were laid out and groaning under the weight of fifteen or twenty traditional and very elaborate Turkish entrees and desserts, all prepared by the fiancee’s mother.
The room was white, the lights bright and threatening. We sat in a circle, all thirteen of us, looking at each other. Somebody asked me in English about teaching—whether I like it, what I like about it. Two people discoursed, at length, in Turkish, about Modern versus Classical art. At one point I played and sang Pogues songs and “Stagger Lee” for everybody on a guitar, and the uncle played a classical Ottoman song. At eleven, everybody got up and left.
I still have no idea what it was all about—why all those people were there. D—says that it wasn’t because we were in town from America—that it was a surprise even to her cousin, who had also expected a quiet, intimate dinner. Something about how the uncle is in town, and is leaving for Ankara tomorrow and people wanted to give him a nice sendoff. I must have looked very stunned for the first hour or so after arriving, because the predominant thought in my brain was “Where am I? What is happening?” Like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…Do you, Mr. Jones?” No. Mr. Gots did not know what was happening. He just tried to smile and look harmless—an American appreciative of Turkish hospitality.
At the party I saw D-s cousin’s husband, who is a modern artist (of some international fame) and one of the more unique personalities I have ever encountered. I have met him twice before, at our engagement party in Turkey and at our wedding. He does not speak English and I do not speak Turkish, but somehow we always end up spending hours talking to each other. D- says that she does not understand what he is saying even in Turkish, so abstract and strange is his manner of speaking. In English, he says things like: “The box! Symbolic!” and then, when you ask what he means, repeats them, nodding. Yesterday he told me that he has it on authority from his friend in the Swedish Parliament that Bob Dylan is an International Spy. He wants to make films for a couple of my instrumental tracks and to publish a Turkish-themed comic I have invented but not yet written in his new online Zine (called “E-Benzine,” I think). According to D--, although he is frequently incomprehensible, he is incredibly confident and productive—constantly at work on film, painting, and installation projects, of which he has completed hundreds, if not thousands. His website (www.simulasyon.net) describes his work (in English) as follows:
“Simulation of my production was formed through creating inflation of installation in works which may be based as vanishing art. My works were built upon understanding to understand (commenting on meaning--Hermaneutics) in the present form.
Seek of art here involves a deep ‘reconstruction’ process in the context of forming relation between the inspected and inspecting devices and research purposes.
Interdisciplinary—intermethodical relationships were formed. It is based upon forming new perception systems by fastening the vanishing process of the art.”
Notwithstanding a few translation-related grammatical errors, this is, D—tells me, pretty much what it says in the Turkish version.
After a week’s worth of living, eating, visiting and struggling to understand Turkish, it is strange and wonderful to be writing in English again. If the past week has been any indication, it will be difficult to maintain any kind of regular schedule with this blog while I am in Turkey, but I will post as frequently as I am able, and record the highlights and the lowlights of the Summer’s experiences. Hadi gorusuruz…
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