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| Korean edition in the middle! |
On the road to Ephesus I let Amanda play photographer and focused on chatting with our cab driver using my ten new Turkish vocabulary words along with his five English ones. The first words in a new language are so delicious, like popping one tasty truffle into my mouth after another, unsure of what’s inside but delighted all the same.
I was a bit bummed about the futility of recording everything. Sometimes a photo or a note jotted down in my notebook is enough, but “enough” for what? To remember? To capture? To share?
Maybe it’s just to entertain myself, to become more amusing as an old lady, with a slideshow to accompany my stories.
Sometimes it feels aggressive or possessive, like theft. Like conquest.
I write everything down because I want my ideas and thoughts to be more explicit, to thicken in layers of meaning and metaphor. I love and enjoy visual art of all stripes, but my mind tends to move best in language.
Language is insufficient, too, though. At least my skill with it is: I try and try to get at the lushness of the vegetation in Laos, or the light that moves across the rooftops in Barcelona, but my pictures have me beat before I even open my notebook. These images are mute. They evoke whatever they do without words, without need of words. Images are so elegant and efficient in that sense.
When I feel like I’m overdoing it on the recording and analysis, I make deliberate efforts to put my pen and camera away and just look, just smile and talk and try to let go into observation and experience alone. But I hate for things to end, I hate to ever forget anything, lose anything, throw anything away -- in part because it feels like that’s all I do sometimes. Lose things. Break, stain, ruin things. Leave them behind, have them stolen, mail them somewhere to where I’m not.
Its tremendously comforting to get ideas out on paper or in pixels, to know that they’re in my pocket or humming in the internet, and I don’t have to trust this silly brain to keep from forgetting it all.
Anyway, Ephesus.
We first visited some ruins believed to be the last place where the Virgin Mary lived before her death. It was bizarre to think of her as a real person, someone living in a house as an old woman with caretakers and apostles by her side. I felt nothing but a bit of awe at the age of the building; a man next to me from the Philippines wept as he prayed.
There were prayers written on scraps of fabric tied to this wall outside, a huge knotted mass of them. I wrote similar prayers on wooden plaques at shrines in Kyoto and left paper flakes of gold on Buddha’s knees in Bangkok, but this time I took a pass.
It was partially to keep from holding our little group back, but it was also because Christianity has no novelty. I never believed that my plaques or gold flakes would get me anywhere but it was fun to bow and circle, to join with people of unfamiliar practices and try it, try everything.
I half wish I had tied a prayer to the wall now, too. Occasionally I treat Christianity like an ex, or like a friend who wronged me somehow whom I no longer speak to. That simply isn’t the case; Christianity didn’t wrong me, it just wasn’t right. It’s better when I treat it as neutral, as one amongst many religions I don’t believe in, though I happen to know a bit more about it than the others. The art is better when I think this way, the ruins are more awe-inspiring. Just another current in the stream of history: as an observer and contemplator of life, I can get close to it without expectation or intimacy.
The library of Celsus was awesome. Once it had space for 12,000 scrolls! Celsus was buried inside! I want to be entombed in a library! Wickedness all around.
I was also thrilled by the last standing column of the temple of Artemis... and by my camera’s incredible lens and its ability to capture the nest on top.
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