The Evoked Set

I have been in Istanbul for ten days now. Tomorrow I will head to Yerevan, Armenia- partly out of a conviction that I want to finally visit a country I have never visited before. So far my exile travels have been repeats of the past. And while I do not dislike memories, I am in the mood for something different. I do not know where my mood will take me from Armenia. I think Tbilisi-Jason and the Golden Fleece- might be in my future.

Istanbul has been enjoyable and has conjured up many memories for me- though most of them did not take place in this city. I have noticed some changes since I was last here- there are more prayer beads and more headscarves than I recall from before. The sidewalks are better paved (something that someone inclined towards a general klutziness tends to notice). The hospitality is still not for want, even in the midst of what feels to be a very Western and modern city. Ataturk can still be found in nearly every location. Someone remarked to me today that there must be a special school just for Ataturk sculptors so that there is uniformity in capturing his piercing eyes. I have to say the man looks rather scary.

It has snowed and rained a good portion of the time. The weather made me feel justified about the hours I spent pouring over foreign policy books in the Bogazici University library. This evening my read seemed to be interminable- one more page of a political scientist trying to spell out hundreds of psychological variables that might affect human behavior, so as map the way towards a predictive model of this behavior, might have driven me mad. I find the whole notion of such a predictive model somewhat absurd anyway. I walked out into the cold rain and caught a cab to Levent, the area I moved to a week ago to leave the tourists of Sultanahmet. It was time for my last meal in Turkey- at least this trip. I think food brings back more memories than anything.

The smells and flavors of hot lentil soup, splash of lemon, brought me back to Marash and the days at the excavation. The heat of the afternoons was almost unbearable. We would lie on the woven mats in the shade until afternoon tea, trying to sleep while still sweating. In the evenings, after having sorted the pottery, we would each take our one ice cold Efes, attempting to make it last through dinner if possible. I would watch the sunset and the distant Taurus mountains, thinking of the people who came down from them thousands of years before to begin building the complex web of societies we find ourselves in today. This is why I will never accept the premise that mankind is utterly trapped by structures, be they environmental, economic, or ideational. We built what we live in now- politics, economics, culture are the result of man’s creativity and action. History did not emerge from a vacuum. These sunsets and the mountains, the Anatolian plains, often brought on the same sensations I would feel while staring across empty expanses of ocean that accentuated the details of the sky.

The spiced yogurt blended with lamb reminded me of the kitchen where the Kurdish girls would prepare our meals. I would take my breaks with them, listening to one talk about her imminent marriage to a Turk living in Switzerland. She was scared and exhilarated. They would teach me bits of Turkish and Kurdish- most of which I cannot recall now. I would return to the water and archaic set-up I used to extract plant material (my little paleoethnobotany sidejob) from the samples at the site. As I sorted I worked my way through seven thousand year old pottery, finding small joy each time the mud washed away and revealed a new design. I liked to consider that I was the first person touching this man-made object in thousands of years and wondered if I could sense some sort of connection to the last person who touched it. What were they thinking? What did they care about?

I often still recall the face of the excavation’s driver. I cannot remember his name now- only that he came from Urfa or Diyarbakir and that his eyes always seemed to emanate a happy light. He was a devoted Muslim, never missed prayer. He would quietly and unobtrusively slip away to his tent and I used to watch him ceremoniously washing his feet and prepare himself for prayer. In the nights when we all passed around a horrid bottle of raki he would smile and watch us get drunk- telling us without judgment that he was praying for us all. I would stumble back to my tent still, in the midst of my inebriation, terrified of the ungodly enormous orange spiders indigenous to the area. Even in drunkenness I did not forget my greatest fear. I kept the mosquito net tucked in tightly around the two cots I had put together, one for storing all my clothes in a place where I was convinced that the spiders would never reach- boots included. I never wanted to find one in my bed or in my boots in the morning. I methodically checked for any sign of a gap between the two cots, lest there be an entrance for would be intruders. Then I would drift away into sleep for a few hours and hope no portion of my arm touched the netting in the night. That was always a prize for the relentless mosquitoes.

The TV at the restaurant was showing clips of Libya. Finally the West had intervened and it was not a unilateral American action. I was thankful for that. I mulled over the emotion I felt the day before as the news of US Navy launched Tomahawks broke. I had been exhilarated, proud of having had a hand in the shape of the operational planning, and even tad bit wishful that I was located on one of those warships when they launched. This emotion was quickly joined with guilt and even shame for having felt it. Libya was a tragic situation all around- the fact that it had to come to this. People were dying from those missiles- even if they were Gaddafi’s forces. Was it the violence that brought me this sudden vicious pleasure? Or was it simply organizational pride? I put my raw, unintended emotions aside- they could be evaluated later.

Now is time for a new travel adventure. For the first time in this trip, I find myself excited again…