Philosophy regarding a Turkish commode

"I can hold it," Laura announces, sliding defeatedly into her rickety plastic chair. "It's Turkish."

We are at a bus terminal in Athens waiting for transport to Delphi, and Laura has
"just paid fifty cents to not use the bathroom." I have two bottles of water and a cup of coffee in me, and a forthcoming 3-hour bus ride. I decide to take my chances.

I hand the woman manning a table before a door labeled "W.C." fifty (euro) cents, and pass her, focused on entering the dark watery beyond. "Wait," she calls after me. I turn. "Paper?" She holds up a generous portion of toilet paper, and I accept it, smiling.

Then turn back to my fate.

I open the stall door to find a Turkish commode: two rippled foot ledges bordering a porcelain funnel which disappears into a dark hole.

Like peeing in the woods, I decide a moment later. Except with a convenient sink and soap. Cleaner, in fact, than the U.S. and English version of toilets, given that you don't touch anything. It even flushes.

This is something I have learned from being abroad: difference is not scary. When you need to pee and there's a hole but no place to sit, this is not scary, it's just different. When you need to eat but no one speaks your language so you don't know exactly what's in that pie you're getting, this is not scary, it's just different.

When facebook changes its layout, this is not scary. It's just different.

Ultimately, if you have a safe, cleanish place to sleep, and you're getting fed somehow, and there is a place to relieve yourself, and your friends are still alive and human regardless of how you connect with them, life is okay. Things come in different forms, but life is okay.

When you realize that, you are not only a successful Buddhist, but you are a happy happy person.

It's a sweet kind of liberation.


Snapshot:
You stand on an uneven rock before an enormous, weathered, ivory-colored pillared building, and the sun hits the top of your head with fiery effectiveness. You're thinking about cataracts, about peeling skin, about a hat, about the accoutrements you wish you had now, and then you stop, and you just are, you and the Parthenon, and you are full of shame because you are here but you don't know about columns or Athena really or old politics but you're here and someone else is not.

So you study it and catalog details so that when you do learn, you remember.


Snapshot:
The ferry is disappointingly enclosed so you press your nose against the glass and watch the spray strain to reach it. When the dock collides with the boat, you bound out, onto land, you breathe. The old Greek man with weathered skin twinkles at you and directs you down the road, there's a beach there, maybe some tourists but mostly not, and so the three of you walk, the soft sea on one side and the Mediterranean rock and brush on the other, glaring at you kindly, and the only people who pass are brown boys on motorbikes, black hair blue eyes, they look at you with mild curiosity and then they are gone. When you reach the beach you shed your towel, your clothes, and you slide into the water and it's the warmest saltiest smoothest clearest water you've ever seen and now you are in, it's effortless, it's like coming home, the oldness goes and you feel new.

Snapshot:
The center of the world.

Snapshot:
Istanbul. It's Laura's birthday so Ali the hostel-owner buys her a cake and all the hostel sings happy birthday, and then crosses the bridge for drinks, are we going to Asia? And after it's over you walk over uneven slate cobblestones to the sea, it's almost sunrise, there are enormous blocks of rock barricading the sea from the road and the city, and first Alex and Mikel remove their shirts and their shoes and their pants, and then Xabi, and then Heather goes, and you and Laura, and with a shivery splash you're in the sea, very different from Greece but there's the saffron sun, exhilaration, good morning Istanbul!

Snapshot:
You're barefoot, your sandals are in your purse, you fumble with a blue cloth big enough to use as as a toga should you so choose, and finally you turn and ask the guard--"No problem! I show you--here." He throws it over your shoulders, covering the skin of your arms, and you gesture at your hair, shouldn't you cover that? He waves his hands, smiles, "Okay." And gestures you inside.

You enter your first mosque. There's the enormous open space, the dome above. There's the pious man praying, up and down, murmuring in another language. There's the low wooden fence separating you, the nonbeliever, from them, the believers. There's the screened alcove behind you where the women go.

Here you are, in the Blue Mosque, and for the past two days you have not been anonymous, you have been white, you have been English-speaking, you have had blonde hair and blue eyes

and you have had a vagina without accompanying hijab.

Men undress you with their eyes on the street.

At first it was cheesily charming,
"Did you drop down from heaven?"

Then it was funny,
"Hello, Spice Girls. Can I hassle you?"

Then, it was
"You have beautiful lips. Come kiss me with them."

too
"Gorgeous chicks."

much.
Always.
You walk on the sidewalk and they want to sell you something, or they don't, but they talk to you, the men, always men, and sometimes, sometimes, you want your body, your eyes, your lips, to not be remarked upon, because somehow the remarking makes them, your body, your eyes, your lips, belong not to you but in small part to the remarker, and after three days of remarks none of it is yours anymore.

So you stand in that mosque and you look at the women's section and you remind yourself not to be imperialistic, not to be a judging outsider, but you stand there and you look at the women mysterious in their screened piety and you are angry.

What is this society, that is so afraid of women?

Cover them up.

If a Turkish man sees a woman he has to remark, to sexually taunt, he cannot let her be because that is allowing her to be herself and that is a terrifying kind of power.


For a week in Istanbul not a single Turkish woman spoke to me. Anytime I bought a ticket, or a sandwich, it was a man on the other side of the counter. And they didn't let me live separate from my gender.

This, I find, is what it means to be weary.

I do not know what progress means.
So I define it myself.
Progress is not machines.
Progress is not English.
Progress is not Christianity.
Progress is not Western.

Progress is the antithesis of this soul weariness.
Progress is a society that allows everyone to grow.
Progress is freedom which is truly for everyone.

This has little to do with government or religion.

According to the government of Turkey, I am free to walk down the street in any clothes.
According to me, I am not.

There is a lack of freedom in the United States too.
A discrepancy.
If we are all free, if no group subjugates another, why is there rape?


Last Snapshot:
The most beautiful building in the world.
I have not been in all the buildings in all the world, but I know that nothing, nothing, could ever be more sacredly beautiful than this.
The Hagia Sophia.
A cathedral and then a mosque and now a museum. Mixed on the walls are murals of Christ and motifs of Islam. The ceiling goes up longer than you thought any ceiling could, and every corner, dome, rise, is painted with the kind of old art you see in textbooks.
You forgot your language, and it doesn't matter, because no matter what war we're fighting or what religion is currently all the rage, this is a sacred place.
For you.
For everyone.

London bridge hath fallen down: a day in between

Twelve hours after leaving Cape Town on Friday the twelfth, our plane lands in London. I hug Brian and others goodbye for the last time, and while they hurry away toward their gates which are their portal to America, I make my way leisurely to the baggage claim.

I'm about to make my solo debut into Europe.

I miss Cape Town, I miss my friends there, the death of my life there; I am so full of reaction to the irretrievable nature of life that I cannot pick apart emotions and examine them. Rather, they exist all together in my body, somewhere near my intestines or my heart or the constricted balloons of my lungs or my soul, they're all the same and filling me up, and it's been so long since I've last slept that my body cannot cope.

Yet I find myself alone in a strange country, with no clock and no rules.

Cue mischievous grin.

I retrieve my luggage and roll clunkily into the women's toilet near customs. I brush my teeth. I change into the brightest summeriest skirt I own. I wash my face. I brush my hair. I get strange looks from the pregnant Czech woman manning the bathroom.

Clearly, if I'm going to be in Europe for the first time, I have to look good. This is my wall against the world, my protection, my unofficial passport.

I take the Tube into central London and emerge into the city without a hitch. It's 8 a.m. and I am high on the fact of being someplace I have never been before; it's a joy like none other, one to which I am fast becoming addicted. It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and everyone I pass on the street looks glum. They look at me curiously, taking second glances, and it's because I'm wearing a summery skirt on a cloudy morning, it's because I am buoyant in my walk, it's because I nod at them which they do not do to one another, it's because (I surmise), at this moment, I am pretty and happy and the bouncing personification of life.

It is the most freeing thing in the world to be the only person you know in a whole country.

I get mildly lost looking for my hostel and so clunk into a hotel several light-years above my budget to ask the German behind the counter where my street is. He smiles at me, shows me on the map, and sends me on my way. I find it, drop off my luggage, and ask directions to Westminster Abbey.

I walk, and accidentally-on-purpose lose myself again. I don't mind; this part of London is clean and prosperous. Londoners are awakening and opening shops, and tourists are marching purposefully through the streets toward some common goal. (I am reminded of the Pied Piper.)

I notice ahead of me a blonde, middle-aged couple; the man has socks with sandals and a heavy black Canon with about 35 lenses dangling around his neck. I focus on it in shock.

Won't it get stolen?

Good God, we're not in Cape Town anymore. I haven't been asked for money once. No one has solicited me for sex or any other dubious purpose. No one has tried to sell me "ethnic" goods.

On the contrary, most people are white. Most people have expensive haircuts and artfully cheap-looking expensive clothes. A man passes me in the opposite direction, his jeans razored beautifully and falling exactly tightly enough over his hips, his goatee perfect. I catch part of his sentence as he barks into a silver cell phone with no buttons: "...possible to meet at quarter past..." I blink after him. What an idiot. Everyone knows you have to find a non-sketchy shop to go into if you want to talk on your cell phone in public. If you even leave home with it at all, which I rarely did in Cape Town.

But this place is different.

You can dangle your $2,000 camera nonchalantly around your neck. You can talk on your several-hundred-dollar Blackberry on the sidewalk. I don't see anyone who is even below middle class. If you go by exchange rates, I'm in the wealthiest country in the world, and I can take pictures in public without a care in the world.

An enormous weight lifts from me, and I wave it goodbye cheerfully.

I have made it to Fleet Street, which does not look at all like a place Sweeney Todd would inhabit, and wonder where the hell the Thames is. I jingle into a tiny law bookshop (est. 1700s) and ask the man behind the counter, a (suspected) grad student with long hair and an eyebrow ring. He shrugs easily and directs me nicely back the way I've come; apparently I've made a wrong turn.

I find the Thames and take my first picture.



Then, crossing the bridge and thunking down the steps, I am distracted by a used book market under the bridge run by a friendy mom-and-pop team. I choose a book (A History of Tractors in Ukrainian), pay my four pounds, and set off. To my left is a rolling cement landscape of graffiti'd wilderness; teenage boys with neon trick bikes and skateboards (or longboards, or J-boards, or whatever) roll almost upside-down before swooping to the other side. To my right, kids take turns flipping backwards off the stairs onto the grimy Thames sand below.

The city is a playground on a sunny June Saturday. How fabulous.

I make my way at last to Westminster, stopping only for sustenance and pictures, and ease into St. Margeret's with peace.

This right now right here is why I love being alone in a new city sometimes.

If you have never been alone in a strange beautiful cathedral, GO.

I slide into a pew in one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and there are dead bishops, bodies of clergymen that were dust before the printing press. There are candles lit by pilgrims for people who are dying, people who are living, people who are deciding, people who are leading countries and people who are being born. There is furniture the function of which I cannot determine. There are carvings and there is stained glass and there is an enormous soaring ceiling and embroidered knee pillows. There are tourists murmuring, separated or maybe affected.

There is me.

I am there but I forget, I don't exist anymore, there is something mystical, I am allowed when I am alone in a strange city to be the least lonely I have ever been in my life, the most hopeful, the happiest.

There is no such thing as a perfect life, never, and there are things wrong with mine, but at this moment, right now, I am fulfilling my potential, and that is all I ever need.

So I sit there and I look into the mystic and it looks back.

And then I nod and I stand and I take a breath and I walk out the door.

Westminster Abbey has a lot of graves. There are dead people everywhere, marble pious hands, demure holy faces, un-relaxed sleeping sculptured people, wooden people, painted people, faceless people, flowered people, people who have no likeness or words but just a name cut into a coffin-sized marble tile:

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN.

Queen Elizabeth I with her ridiculous collar which attaches itself to her even (or especially?) in death, and opposite her Mary Queen of Scots, whose execution Elizabeth ordered. There are choir rooms and altars and cloisters and temples, all magnificent, all unbelievable in their architecture and expensive detail.

My breath skips when I see the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. Then there is Alfred Tennyson, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and an unholy altar, a veritable shrine, when I reach William Shakespeare.

I meander into the College Gardens, pausing to receive some strange looks when I refill my water bottle in the loo, and find the Rose Garden.

This is what this day is about: the difference between that sweet light intoxicating smell, and the other deeper spicier one. The first is pink with wide traditional petals, the other darker, closer to a sun shape, with smaller, more numerous petals.

Today, I am alone in London, and I smell the hell out of those roses.

Their scent remains with me still.

I leave happy and with no plan.

I walk along streets, vaguely back to my hostel but mostly just toward whatever seems interesting. I see a circle of blacks wearing black, green, and yellow colors singing familiar-sounding music. I stop on the fringe of the circle, the only white person. "'Ello, gorgeous!" There is a table with flyers, and the man behind it, about my age with dreads, hands me one. We are outside the Zimbabwean Embassy, and they are promoting a petition against Robert Mugabe and for fairer elections in Zim. I immediately sign it.

Next to occur before me is Trafalgar Square, which I have heard of but to my shame do not know why. There is an enormous phallic tower with some kind of bronze figure mounted atop it, high over the surrounding official-looking buildings. (With a jolt I see the South African Embassy.) Surrounding it is a fountain and the National Gallery and a mix of tourists and people promoting some kind of cause--in an effort to read the sign I bump into a kindly-looking middle-aged woman, who hands me a flyer. "There you go, love," she says, smiling. It reads, "DARWIN WAS WRONG." A man climbs unsteadily on top of one of the enormous lions guarding the penile monument and reveals a megaphone. "In the modern world," he intones, "we have moved away from the Lord..."





After consulting the map, I meander onwards. I briefly pop into the British Museum and consider Virginia Woolf's brain as I search for the elusive Reading Room. When it closes at 5:30, I purchase a salad from a Romanian woman in a shop, then make my way to one of the ubiquitous parks in this part of London. I sit on the grass and watch: the couple in front of me is slightly nerdy but undeniably in love, the two girls at the far side pick at a guitar ambitiously, the hipster near me is sitting against a tree quietly, the fashionable father kicks a soccer ball to his two young sons, the thirty-five year-old daughter pushes her mother in a wheelchair along the sidewalk.

I have become so used to being another country that London, as a major city in an English-speaking, powerful Western/Northern country, seems like home. It's a perfect break between South Africa and eastern Europe, the beautiful beginning to a backpacking trip through Europe that I can't wholly predict.

Tomorrow is Greece.

Dear South Africa

Dear South Africa,

I wish there was some way I could say it to you.
Say back to you what you've given to me.
But at some point,
when you peel away the tissue
to something deeper,
something so internal you can't feel it except dully,
achingly,
you learn

that there are no words.

So I write this because I don't know anything else,
it's the only thing I can give you,
the only thing I have that I can give, and
I need to tell you,

you humbled me.

I came with my prejudices,
my sophomoric assurance of self-knowledge,
did you know
that I knew everything?

I'm leaving now
after you gave me the dubious gift
of finding
that I know nothing at all.

I went to the high school to teach kids how to debate.
I am inadequate.

I went to the TB hospital to give affection to kids.
They taught me how.

I became surrounded by people who speak more than English.
I only know one language.

There are tag words:
colour.
American.
parliament.
girl.
black, xenophobic, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesothu, Swazi.
Afrikaner.
Apartheid.
racist. sexist.
sexual harrassment, fear, poverty, unemployment, robbery, kidnapping, rape, township, Group Areas Act, white.
Table Mountain.

Once a group of South Africans sang me an impromptu national anthem.

It is difficult,
I have found,
when you love the whole world.

Where do you fit?
As an individual.
I am small,
I am miniscule,
a dot on the face of our big granite Earth,
a flick in time.

We have to categorize to make things fall into comprehension.

The more I learn,
the fewer categories I can endorse.
Thus,
the world loses comprehension...

So here I am
deep in the aching tissue
where the world is
where you are
where I am
and where words can't go.

Thank you for the trip.

I can't claim you for my own,
and so I don't know how to love you
but I do.

I do.
And I always will.