we will be the solid people
Listening to Radio Paradise this morning (the best internet radio station, bar none) while plugging away at a set of instruction sheets for an OfficeMax gondola display, Loreena McKennitt came on with her song “The Gates of Istanbul.” I hadn’t heard it before, having only had cursory encounters with her music, but enough to enjoy her ability to craft lilting, ethereal, interlacing pieces. It’s an ability that is put to good use in the song I heard, and memories of our family trip to Istanbul in 1993 came flooding back. It was the first only marginally European place I had visited. The middle eastern and western influences met in the middle throughout the city, echoing very much the geography of the place, with one foot in Europe and one in Asia, as it were. I remember feeling a sense of safety in that the people who crammed every crevice of the city were people just like me, with emotions, convictions, habits and so on, but at the same time those very things were unfamiliar or expressed in ways that would take more getting used to. I remember mosques in every part of the city, frequented, it seemed, far more than the dusty cathedrals we visited in greater Europe, something which emphasized their centrality to life the city. I remember being woken early in the morning, the sky only just progressing from a city black to lighter shade, by the cries of the callers from the mosques’ minarets, calling the devout to morning prayers. I was reading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce at the time and the effect of it all created a surreal mélange where exotic city life, an all-pervasive but false religion and an excellent novel about the afterlife wove themselves together in my mind. I wasn’t losing my faith–far from it; I remember an almost overwhelming sense of betrayal when we visited Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, converted into a mosque, and saw the enormous circles inscribed with Arabic calligraphy fixed to the tops of the pillars along with the shoddily (compared to the Blue Mosque just across the street) erected minarets at the four corners of the building. The building’s glory had been usurped to serve a false god and mixed with a sense of awe at the vastness of the place was a sadness over what it had lost.
beautiful post, Matt