A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: travel

October 14, 2013

A French Summer

The plane landed at Roissy onto a tarmac that mirrored the drab June sky. Always the day of her arrival was unseasonable weather. The French shook their heads and said the same thing “Ah! Ce temps.”  55 degrees and overcast with a ninety percent chance of rain, a hundred percent chance of gray. Summer by no standard.

France was its most insufferably French during the first hours spent escaping Charles de Gaulle airport: the interminable wait for the bags, the queue of dusty taxis to ship her off on highways flanked by concrete bunkers and sloppy graffiti. The scenic roads of France. Supermarkets housed in lego-blocks with chipper names like Conforama and Bricolorama, factories resembling Ikea versions of corrugated tin shanties, barely alive plants peaking above plastic coverings.  Further inland they drove, past the white-tiled tunnels with their overhead yellow-lit rectangles, past the wastelands of suburban brick flickering offside the highway barriers like images from a moving train. Resting her head against the taxi window, listening to the haggle on the radio, she felt acute disappointment. 

And the countryside did not seem quite right either. It was more crooked and wobbly than she remembered. They passed cigarette-stained towns with peeling shutters and windowsill doilies, old ladies in black orthopedics and knee-length skirts, mending handkerchiefs and knitting stiff wool. France had let weeds grow along her roads, in her gardens, up her trellis; the bristly stalks of unknown plants had taken over the clean corners. 

She was reminded of her grandmother and this made her more depressed. 

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October 2, 2013

Losing Ma’loula

In the summer of 2005,  I travelled to Damascus to visit a French couple just before they moved back to Paris, a short week of sightseeing as they packed boxes and said their goodbyes. I only had time  to tour the capital and the surrounding umber hillsides carved with ancient Christian churches, caves and villages. As practicing Catholics, my friends had become close with a presiding  priest at Mar Sarkis, a sixth century Byzantine monastery in Maaloula. Though I spent an entire day in Maaloula, I remember very few physical things. Instead I recall a vast interior landscape, a silence and gentleness, an expansive sense of mystery and wonderment, coupled with the well-worn solitude that a  traveler experiences in ancient grounds. I sat inside the church and waited. I do not even know what I was waiting for, but it was worth the wait. Maaloula is somewhere very few Westerners I know have traveled. It is not Petra. It is not Angkor Wat. It is not Teotihuacan.  It is living – a quiet soft village, one of the last places on earth where people still speak Aramaic. It is a treasure.

The news reports that Maaloula has been seized by extremists, the Al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda force operating with Syrian rebels. Many if not all of the ancient Antiochian Orthodox or Greek Catholic churches, monasteries and convents have endured some degree of destruction – altars and shrines smashed, domes pierced by mortar. There are reports that some have been completely leveled. Most Christians have fled. Perhaps it is propaganda. Time will tell the truth.

They are calling it a political thing. A thing of blame. But I l say it is a human thing – this deftness at devouring ourselves.  Like the worm Ouroboros, we eat our own tail. We smash ourselves repeatedly against the wall of time, we burn our idols, we obliterate our myths, we kill our Gods. Narrowing our intentions, we make so tiny the wormhole we must squeeze through. If only we were really the worm Ouroboros, the worm eating itself, the worm born of itself and from itself, the regenerative worm. I do not know. But I know that today we pay a great price when we destroy our own mysteries.

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