Don Quixote in Baku

We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia…Professor Sanin was telling us in his flat and uninspired way…”Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia’s cultural evolution, part of Europe. It can there be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia.” …Then Mehmed Haidar, who sat on the back bench, raised his hand and said, “Please sir, we should rather stay in Asia”.

-Ali and Nino, an East-West romantic novel by Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Its authorship is contested by other competing claims between a German, an Azeri, and a Georgian

When Lev was allowed to go out [of his house in Baku], his favorite walks took him to the Asian quarter of town, with its mosques, its minarets, its narrow streets, and low houses…His identification with Islam and the Orient began there, when he was not yet ten years old. “To this day I still do not know whence this feeling came…I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night. And I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life”. (quoting from his memoirs)

“The ship was like an insane asylum,” Lev wrote in his memoirs. “We sailed starving, freezing, and semiconscious over the waves.” He tried to distract himself by reading the only book they had with them, a Russian edition of Don Quixote. (on returning to Baku after having fled as a child because of political unrest)

-The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Tom Reiss, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum

Baku in 1999 was a bit like La Mancha- with bowing oil derricks instead of spinning windmills, Persian lamb hats instead of barber basins worn on the head, and Soviet-era clunkers crowding new Mercedes sedans instead of rocines (nags) jockeying by Rocinante. I stayed in the Old City, the Icheriseher, in a rented room belonging to a vintage carpet restorer, not far from the Shirvanshah Palace and Maiden’s Tower. The other rooms were occupied by refugee families of the Karabagh war. The bathroom was down two flights, across the courtyard, and behind a half door. No light bulb. Remember to knock.

It was coming up on the Miss Azerbaijan contest’s final rounds, and because my landlord moonlighted as a fashion stylist of historical costumes, the courtyard was jammed with aspiring Dulcineas dressed in traditional brocaded gowns, their heads covered with conical and pillbox hats tied with primary-colored silk scarves. There was also a swimsuit and talent contest, if I recall. In 1999, Fatima Abbasguliyeva was the winner. That I didn’t remember, because I only stayed for the first walk-around, when the contestants twirled out front before the judges in evening gowns and high heels.

I never did hear a call to prayer all the week I stayed there. Maybe it was heard across the border in Iran, but not here in Azerbaijan. The Ceyhan pipeline was almost finished, running from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Georgia and Turkey. A million barrels a day. That’s plenty of Allah Akbars for any country, whether in Europe or Asia.

If Marco Polo had Met Baron Munchausen...

Or did Marco fake the whole thing? A whiff of suspicion has lingered about him ever since…Even now, it is argued that Marco ventured no farther than Constantinople or the Black Sea and cribbed tales from more venturesome Arabs and Persians.

-National Geographic Magazine, May 2001

Having heard for the first time that my adventures have been doubted and looked upon as jokes, I feel bound to come forward and vindicate my character for veracity. (from the Preface)

Some years before my beard announced approaching manhood, or in other words when I was neither man nor boy, but between both, I expressed in repeated conversations a strong desire of seeing the world…(from Chapter 1)

When I was in service of the Turks I frequently amused myself in a pleasure barge on the Marmora which commands a view of the whole city of Constantinople, including the Grand Seignior’s Seraglio. (from Chapter Nine)

We at length arrived on the confines of an immeasurable desert- an immense plain extending on every side of us like an ocean. Not a tree nor a shrub nor blade of grass was to be seen, but all appeared an extreme fine sand mixed with gold dust and little sparkling pearls. (from Chapter 25)

-Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, Rudolph Erich Raspe, 1785

Factitious disorder imposed on self, also known as Munchausen syndrome…for cases of feigned illness not driven by a psychiatric disorder, see Malingering

-Wikipedia

Like the famous Baron, the persons affected have always travelled widely and their stories are both dramatic and untruthful.

-Regis Olry, Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience

Did Marco Polo really fake the whole thing, as did Raspe in his tall written tales about the Baron, especially about his battles against the Turks in the two Russo-Turkish Wars, and as did the Baron himself in his own tall tales that once back home he told to his fellow German aristocrats, in the words of one of them who frequented his story telling sessions, in order “to ridicule the disposition for the marvellous that he observed in some of his acquaintances”.

So too Marco found a Venetian readership with a ready disposition for marvellous things of the East, egged on perhaps too far by his cellmate and co-author Rustichello da Pisa. And so too did the Nazis, under whom a 1943 film about the Baron’s Adventures- aimed at rivaling Alexander Korda’s 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad for its special effects in color- was made starring the actress and Third Reich-propagandist Ilse Werner as a princess kidnapped into the Seraglio, rescued by the Baron wearing a magic invisibility ring, and carried in his unseen arms past shrieking eunuchs and bumbling harem guards in a madcap Orientalist semi-nude slave girl scene. (For a nudier version, see Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film of the same name with Uma Thurman.)

As Egyptian folktales always end, I know because I was there and I just got back. But if spoken by Marco Polo, the Baron, or someone named Werner, don’t believe a word they tell you. Either they weren’t there and made it all up, or they were there but dreamt it.

Fraulein Werner rescued by Baron Munchausen from the hurma (protected women) in the harem

lyrics recorded where electric lines don't reach

Tape 6 Track 1 Take 6. Cifte Telli, For years you have left me alone to myself, my heart burns in your absence. You burn my heart, you threw into fire my head full of pains. [Recorded 22 September 1955, my 1st birthday] Take 7. The southern hot wind is blowing…etc. Track 2 Take 1. The spring has come again…Your hair is beautiful. Take 2. Are you tired? You astonish me. Take 3. Let’s go to Adana and have some fun. Take 5. The fortress of Estargon has a moat before it. My sweet heart has left it, with the absence of my beloved one, I am sad. Tape 8 Track 1 Take 1. Ceplikli, dance rhythm, periodic handclapping, interrupted by a donkey’s cry.

…this was the first time since I had been in Turkey that I felt that away from the half-Westernized cities there were still some places left where people were not ashamed to strike a rhythm on a drum.

-Translated lyrics and Recording notes, Deben Bhattacharya, The Desert Road

I know what it’s like to come upon a wayside bard singing in an incomprehensible language, knowing nonetheless that what he says is true but soon to be forgotten, and must be heard by others urgently. Out comes the tape recorder and he sings the song again. Her waist is not flabby but her hips are wide/Yet still just one hand can gird her buttocks riding high/By the life of the Prophet on a feast day!/Her gown shines brighter than the glow of dawn.

Back in New York, UN Arabic translator Khidr abd al-Razik, a Sudanese familiar with Kordofani dialects, told me exactly what Saeed had sung, and I was floored. All those weeks and miles in the desert, carrying such lyrics with me. Gold. Then Khidr said that the song’s following lyrics indicated Saeed was singing about his camel. Even better I thought.

Maybe Deben had a translator standing by in the field with him, more likely he had to wait until he got to the next half-Westernized city where someone bilingual might live. So he was like me a bit, although with better equipment and better field notes. Carrying unknown love lyrics in a bag, waiting until later to fully understand what they said, but knowing they will make everyone either laugh or cry.

We listened to Hanan Bulu Bulu’s song Zurni Marra til the tape wore out

What egyptian Dogs Do on Three Legs

We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’ further assertion that Egypt was a country in which ‘the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.’

-Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff

So Herodotus made Cleopatra laugh. I wonder what he would have made of Elizabeth Taylor’s kohl-lined blue eye shadow shaped like bird wings and gold-beaded braids looking like cat-o’-nine tails. I bet he would have said something more about the wonders of Egypt, about eyes that fly and hair that hurts. That too would have made her laugh. And he would have taken one look at her sitting on that golden throne and said, Stand up and pee like a Queen!

I don’t think that most Egyptians I met in Cairo in 1978 had even heard the name Herodotus. A Greek?, they would have asked. You mean a Rumi- a word originating in Rome but broadened to mean anyone from the wider Greco-Roman Western world, such as a Ptolemy or an American.

Cairenes are known for their sense of humor because there is a survival imperative at work in that dog-eat-dog city- if you can’t beat ‘em, laugh at ‘em. I never got the hang of how to joke with Egyptians. I once called Ahmad, my building’s doorman, Abu Bawaaseer, Father of Hemorrhoids, when he went into the hospital for treatment, and he looked at me like I’d kicked him in the teeth. Not so funny after all.

I never got to ask him that riddle about what dogs do on three legs, so I can’t say if Cleopatra might have laughed at that one too. But I bet in any case she was a cat person, not a dog lover, so a peeing dog joke wouldn’t have rung her bell. But Egyptians all love Arabic language punning. So here is one for the post-hemorrhoidal Ahmad. If you eat ful (stewed beans, the Egyptian staple meal) like a fool, you’ll bul (pee) from your bowel. Sorry, Abu Bawaaseer.

Constantinople's panorama, dome by dome

The crystalline and prismatic forms of Sinan’s externally articulated domed mosques are often regarded as somewhat untypical regional offshoots of “truly Islamic” architecture…

-The Age of Sinan, Gulru Necipoglu

Melchior Lorck captured the sweep and swagger of Istanbul at its most imperious acme.

-Julian Raby, former Director of the Freer-Sackler Galleries, Washington D.C.

My first desire was to visit the Church of St. Sophia…it is indeed a magnificent mass of buildings…with its huge vault or dome in the middle…Almost all the Turkish mosques are modelled upon [it].

-The Turkish Letters, 1581, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian Empire’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, in whose embassy the artist Melchior Lorck worked when in 1559 he produced a panoramic ink drawing, 11 1/2 meters wide on 21 contiguous paper sheets, of Constantinople’s skyline drafted in exquisite architectural detail, showing the domed articulations of the city’s mosques including the converted church Hagia Sophia, the Mehmet II aka Fatih (before it was destroyed and rebuilt in 1771), the Bayezid II, the Yavuz Selim, and Mimar Sinan’s masterpiece the Suleymaniye newly completed in 1557, drawn from a vantage point on the heights across the Golden Horn

The Ottoman-style domed mosque rules the world. Even many Saudi-financed mosques in the most remote places, especially in former Soviet Central Asian lands, are marked by the work of Hagia Sophia-inspired protractor and compass-wielding architects. That some art historians might have ever called this style an untypical regional offshoot of something truly Islamic seems hard to accept.

Tourists in Istanbul have many vantage points from which to see the city on either side of the Golden Horn or across the Bosporus. The Galata Tower is a good place and so is from the foredeck of any ferry crossing from Uskudar. But five centuries ago Melchior Lorck found the best place of all and it has been rediscovered in modern times by clever digital geometricians recreating his angles of perspective and lines of sight.

What they find is that in order to have seen the entire skyline, Lorck must have done what all tourists have to do in order to see it all- walk around a bit. By doing just that, you will find that domed mosques are everywhere. Non-domed mosques in Istanbul are rare, usually those that have been converted from Byzantine-era churches. Most converted churches in fact are domed as well, although perhaps nowhere as prismatic as those built intentionally as mosques with their half, quarter, and eighth fragmented domes adjoining a central dome.

Better than Istanbul’s Greek domed churches-turned-mosques are other Greek and Roman era structures. The Valens Aqueduct running almost one kilometer and spanning the city’s Third and Fourth Hills is to the right of the Bayezid II Mosque, over Lorck’s head in the drawing. It is a long walk between the Hills but worth the effort in order to see how the two mosques that dominate each Hill, the Fatih and the Bayezid II, can be so similar despite having been built 250 years apart. As Lorck knew, such pile-ups of dome upon dome are not regional offshoots of any other style, but rather a style all their own.

A middle page from the 21 page wide panoramic view of Istanbul’s skyline, showing the artist Melchior Lorck at work

Bayezid II Mosque

too steep for a moor to sigh

I was once conversing with a Moor in Madrid with whom I was very intimate, about the Alhambra in Granada of which he had visited. Did you not weep, I asked, when you passed through the courts, and thought of the Abencerrages? No, said he, I did not weep; wherefore should I weep? And why did you visit the Alhambra? I demanded. I visited it, he replied, because being at Granada on my own affairs, one of your countrymen requested me to accompany him thither, that I might explain some of the inscriptions. I should certainly not have gone of my own accord, for the hill on which it stands is steep.

-The Bible in Spain, George Borrow, 1843

Mounting my horse, I followed up the route of the Moslem monarch from this place of his exit…I spurred my horse to the summit of a rock where Boabdil uttered his last sorrowful exclamation as he turned his eyes from taking their farewell gaze; it is still denominated el ultimo suspiro del Moro.

-The Alhambra, Washington Irving, 1832

Upon a rock, Sigh of the Moor, they call/Boabdil sat and cast/On far Granada and Alhambra’s wall/A long look and the last.

-The Sigh of the Moor, Theophile Gautier, 1890

The Moor’s Last Sigh, a myth perpetuated by Irving and updated by Rushdie, painted by Pradilla and poetasted by Gautier, can almost make you lose your breath from laughing so hard at its tired maurophilic cliche. The Moor’s Sigh Pass is at 865m on the autopista south to Motril, at the last point of land where Granada is still visible before cresting the Alpujarras and heading downhill to the Costa Tropical’s nude beaches. There you can sleep at the Moor’s Sigh Campground, buy food from the Moor’s Sigh Groceries, swim in the Moor’s Sigh Pool, and sell tin cans to the Moor’s Sigh Scrapyard.

Borrow’s Moorish friend was right. The Alhambra is up too steep a hill to weep over. I walked there one morning from my hotel down near the Plaza Nueva and huffed and puffed right through the employees entrance before it opened and had the Partal Garden to myself for a few minutes before the tourists poured in. I was moved by its tranquility but not to the point of a sigh or a tear.

I had been interviewing Spanish historians and philologists at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes in the 15th C. Moorish mansion Casa de Chapiz in the San Pedro district. They were all fully versed in Washington Irving’s maurophilia and how to temper it with the counter-narrative of the Reconquista’s religious fervors. Even better, Read George Borrow, they said. He was an anti-papist Protestant bible salesman who disliked both Muslims and Catholics.

The Moor’s Last Sigh, Francisco Pradilla Ortiz

much to lose, much to remember

I wrote Books 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 10 in Paris...Afterwards in England I wrote Book 11 and then lost all but the Introduction and drafts of Books 9 and 10 at Reading Station while changing trains…My war time notes, on which it was largely constructed, were destroyed as each section was finished. Only three people read much of it, before I lost it. A month or so later I began in London to scribble out what I remembered…Naturally the style was careless. (Preface)

For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day, the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. (Chapter One)

-Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, Lawrence

It seems quaint today to lose your written work, all 250,000 words, in a train station and not as is more usual in a computer crash or a failure to push the save button. And then so heroic to recreate all that work in the following 3 months as did Lawrence, and once in a single twenty four hour day- “sunrise to sunrise” as he said- when he rewrote Book 6’s 75 pages.

That rewrite came to 400,000 words, and a year later he cut it to 335,000, this version not published in full until 1997. On my bookshelf, I have copy number 98 in the limited Doubleday 1935 edition of 750, consisting of a word count cut back to 250,000. However many words you care to read, each of them regained- welled up by will again- one by one from his memory after all had been lost, they still fly by.

But what if your written work is not left behind but rather combusts before your very eyes, as did my notebook when interviewing an Agadezi on the roof terrace of the Hotel de l’Aïr, overlooking the Grand Mosque’s wood spar-impaled, red mud-daubed, four-sided minaret. He was smoking a cigarette and put it down near my book. He was gesturing broadly, I was looking intently at him to catch his words as they came from his mouth in order to get them transcribed correctly, and suddenly we both smelled them burning.

His words on my paper were going up in smoke. We put out the fire tamping it with the palms of our hands, and only some pages were all consumed, the others merely scorched. I quickly rewrote the pages I’d lost as I best remembered them, including the words of others I’d previously interviewed. The style was careless but it didn’t matter at that note-taking stage, much more careless than Lawrence’s polished finished work, because Seven Pillars in its published third draft is a lodestone of first person narrative about other places, other people, written by a man who by then was calling himself T.E. Shaw, “somebody else” as Rimbaud called himself after a similarly soul-shaking sojourn in those parts.

In such a torrid room what is stirring?

The mouchrabieyah shuts out all sound but the cooing of the doves and the soft flutter of their wings as they circle the plashing fountain. In such torrid rooms…the women, the wives, concubines, slaves and families of the Pachas or Beys knew no other life but that centered round their lord, obtaining or sharing his affections, or, greatly daring, embarking on intrigues and mischiefs to which their sensuality impelled them.

-Pavilions of the Heart, Leslie Blanch

Our shaaqa mafrusha (furnished apartment) on Tomb of Sa’ad [Zaghloul] Street felt appropriately tomb-like, being on the first floor behind a gas station next to the air compressor that switched on constantly and made us keep both windows and shutters permanently closed. It was dark as death inside. And torridly hot.

Egyptians don’t read much- as per the adage “Egypt writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads”- so dim light bulbs were the norm, especially in rental apartments where the landlord had to pay the electricity bills, despite them being minimal because of the Aswan Dam’s cheap power supply.

There was no mashrabiyya filtering the dappled sunshine, no cooing of doves or “plashing” of fountains. We had only 40 watt bulbs and pumping air pistons in our three stifling bedrooms and shared sitting room. Robert was out every afternoon at the movies, I stayed late on campus full of real doves and fountains and natural sunlight, and Michael usually came home right after class to hit the books and start dinner. He liked to make Egyptian dishes and with our hired cook-cum-cleaner Adeela was pleased to share the kitchen.

Once I came home to find him stirring the big pot with the big spoon. What are you cooking, I asked. Oh nothing, said he, just my underwear. Adeela couldn’t get them clean with the warm water from the shower’s heater so I had to put them on to boil.

The French traveller Francois Bernier visited the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s court 300 years ago and made special note of “the drawers worn by females so delicately fine as to wear out in one night". That precious Indian trade reached Egypt and Gujarati textiles have been found in early Cairene Islamic burial sites. I doubt that Michael’s boiled briefs could pass that test of time. Or should be asked.

In Cairo as in Kabul, Getting to Yes

“Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 B.C….” (Interrupting herself:) I am reading from an outdated guidebook about the city of Kabul. In Afghanistan. In the valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains. A guidebook to a city which as we all know has…undergone change.

-Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner

"Things change, prices go up, schedules change, good places go bad, and bad places go bankrupt. Nothing stays the same."

-The Lonely Planet

…the present edition [is] no less useful…in protecting the traveller against extortion…

-Egypt, A Handbook for Travellers, 1902, Karl Baedeker

In Cairo it can be fun to ask random passers-by for directions to out of the way places that it soon becomes obvious none have ever heard of, such as how to get to a certain medieval-era mosque or fountain or madrassah- if by the word “fun” you mean getting a good workout in expressing yourself with the inverses, obverses, converses, and reverses of logic in your student grade colloquial Arabic.

Such as, Where is the al-Hakim mosque? Is it this way (pointing left)? Is it that way (pointing right)? Is it this way (pointing right) or that way (pointing left)? Am I going in the right direction (walking left)? Am I walking in the wrong direction (walking right)? How would you get there? Do you know where it is?

This need to triangulate your questions with alternate expressions of fact is because of two things you quickly learn about Cairenes. In the eyes of foreigners, they hate to appear ignorant about their own city and they are reluctant to disagree, if by disagreeing it means to contradict, which then makes them appear to be disagreeable.

Thus you must ask twice or three times, each time in a different syntactical manner, for directions in ways that at least in one instance requires a definitive answer in the negative. It is also helpful to begin by asking a question to which you already know the answer, such as, Is it this way (pointing in the direction you have come)? If the answer to that is Yes, then you know that your interlocutor is not to be trusted about even the time of day. If the answer is No, however, then at least you can assume that your interlocutor is not a complete dunderhead, or a recently arrived rural migrant in from Zahaliq, Zifta or Zagazig, as bewildered by Cairo as you are.

in the wadi al milk, Seeking rest and refreshment

The Khan of Kohkand, in his turquoise palace in the Fergana, beyond Bokhara, cannot have had much time for the pursuit of true love, for it is said there were three thousand or more concubines chattering, parakeet-shrill about the roof-top terraces which overlooked the wastes of Central Asia. Here man’s life was composed of hunting sorties and battle. Like many other Orientalist overlords, the Khan regarded his harem in the light of an oasis- somewhere he found refreshment (though scarcely rest) after the violent tempo of these territories.

-Pavilions of the Heart, Lesley Blanch

I doubt that three thousand chattering concubines can rest or refresh any man, even if he were the Khan of Kohkand. We were twelve men with only four hundred naaqas to mind, and we were dead tired whenever we made camp and set about hobbling them in the Wadi al-Milk, as close to an oasis as you can find in Dar al-Kababish. Driving camels on the darb al-arbai’in is every bit as tiring as hunting sorties and battle, although its tempo is certainly less violent than it is virulently monotonous.

Lesley Blanch wrote about famous trysting places- “the four walls of love” she called them- including a few in the seraglio, in Pavilions of the Heart. Her joint biography The Wilder Shores of Love, about Western women who defied the boredom of convention at home by heading East and going native in dress and/or in bed, is perhaps more on point.

I gave my copy (not the edition shown here with cover art certain to prompt much spirited critique of the male gaze) to the library of the women’s university in Omdurman to be read as an anti-orientalist deconstruction of Western sexual stereotypes. Let’s see if by reading it, any co-eds there are inspired to sail along the Wadi’s even wilder shores. There they might find a camp of camel drovers, all of them too beat to chatter back, but glad to have a woman stir their aseeda.

Do Camels belong in a zoo?

What in hell were those jangling monstrosities; those big, toothy, snooded goats?…Their eyelids are thatched with the loveliest lashes that God ever loomed. They are sturdy from their ears to the soles of their feet. And their great height lays all the horizon to view.

-Inland, Tea Obreht, a novel in part about the US Camel Corps in Arizona, led by chief drover Haji Ali, aka Hi Jolly, an Arab Christian who converted to Islam and took a muslim name in order to make the haj, then immigrated to America and late in life reverted to his birth name Philip Tedro, born in Smyrna to a Greek mother and Syrian father

Hi Jolly was a camel driver a long time ago, followed Mr. Beale [commander of the Camel Corps] a way out west, didn’t mind the burnin’ sand in that God forsakin’ land, but he didn’t mind the pretty gals the best.

-Hi Jolly, folk song recorded by the New Christy Minstrels

The drovers found it extraordinarily laughable that camels were kept in American zoos. They knew all about a zoo, the jeneinat al-hayawanaat, garden of animals, the Arabic for garden being the diminutive form of the word paradise. A little paradise of animals.

The drovers thought that lions and elephants and giraffes belonged in the zoo, not cows or goats or chickens….or camels. I tried to explain that camels were so unusual in America that people would pay to see them behind a fence, next to the elephants. I told them about petting zoos, where city kids could pet farm animals. That made them laugh too.

Camels living outside their home territory fascinated the drovers. I told them about Australia’s feral camels, they said they would go there to herd them. I told them about the US Camel Corps, and how when it was disbanded the camels were released into the wild. They said, why did they give away valuable livestock? America must be so rich that it doesn’t matter to waste, they thought.

Paris to Calcutta, For the Music

There is someting incredibly beautiful about the first glimpse of an unknown city in twilight. ———— gave us a shock in the evening light. It was so unlike any of the European towns we knew, yet neither did it remind me of any Eastern cities…People were dancing in the restaurant. The stars were up in the dark sky over the dark trees. The dance band went on and on, melancholy music with a lively rhythm. The sound of laughter. A drunken singer went past our van, his voice stumbling like his feet.

Otherwise I had grown fond of the desert’s austerity…It is only the smell of shish kebab hanging around the cafes and street corners which gives character to the Islamic quarters in a city.

-Men and Music on the The Desert Road, Deben Bhattacharya

Deben drove from Paris to Calcutta in 1955 and recorded 40 hours of music in villages, cities, and desert camps along the way, starting in a girls school in Salonika, Greece and ending with temple bells in West Bengal. A single sampling on LP was released in 1956 and Frank Zappa said that he listened to it every day when growing up in southern California. Freak Out! would not have happened otherwise, perhaps.

A four CD set was just released with Deben’s field notes and diary published for the first time. In some recordings he had to cajole tribesmen into giving him a recital. Other times he’d stop in a village and ask around for ”the musician” to identify himself. It was a bit like Paul Bowles’ method in Morocco, recording tribal and city music for the Library of Congress at about the same time.

In 1984 I rode from Sudan to Egypt on a camel drive and had with me a small cassette tape recorder, player, and radio. On the radio we heard about the outbreak of the renewed Sudanese civil war, an attack on a Chevron oil camp not far to our south. On the cassette we played Hanan Bulubulu’s “Zurni Marra”, Visit Me Sometime, a love song, which drove the drovers wild. It wasn’t bad. Prince had the top hit in the US that year, When Doves Cry. Hanan and Prince should have recorded a duet.

But mostly I recorded work songs- at the wells and when driving camels, and also poetry at the campfire, chitchat between the drovers, and some straight up interviews with them, especially KhairAllah who seemed to like the microphone best. These recordings were all low-fi and sand in the gears slowed the speed to make them sometimes almost unrecognizable as human speech.

Back in New York I played the recordings for Alan Lomax who said the well working songs reminded him of throat singing. This was not quite true but they were unusual all the same because of the heavily stressed and syncopated vocal strikes made at each breath exhalation of the two drawers’ alternating cranks while working on a two handled drum to wind the long rope up from the deep well.

As the drum cranking and winding got more and more tiring, the leather bucket becoming heavier and heavier, the pitch, deeper, and speed, faster, of the double vocalized exhalations changed, until the bucket reached the surface and a third man emptied it into the trough while shouting the word, Barra, Outside. Then there was silence other than a splash of water. Either live or as recorded sound, an unexpected splash of water in the desert cannot help but jolt you to attention.

The men liked reviewing the recordings I had made of them. They seemed to like most these work songs. They also liked Polaroid picture portraits we took of them until the camera broke down. They would pull out the pictures from their vest pockets and listen to their voice recordings at the same time. Four years later I made a documentary film about them.

Seeking a sand grain in a sand county

Socrates- Heraclitus says you cannot step twice in the same stream.

Hermogenes- True

-Plato, Cratylus 402

We must make shift with things as they are…The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.

-A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

I first read A Sand County Almanac more than thirty years ago. It was a library book so I did not mark the margin when I came upon a quote that made me stop short and start to daydream upon it. The quote stayed fresh in my mind for some days and then faded completely away. But all these years since I have not forgotten that somewhere in that book is a quote that might again stop me short…if I’m the same person now that I was then.

So I recently picked the book up again. The hunt was on. Leopold writes often about hunting, but not much about rehunting…if that means stalking the same game trails as he had last time, or tracking a deer he’d shot and wounded, or going after a gargantuan size lake trout he remembered, after his line broke, usually swam at 20 feet. I was rehunting in his old grouse cover, waiting in his old deer stand, hunkered in his old duck blind.

Nothing doing. Crickets. I came up dry. Not a word, not the words, could I find.

The best I could come up with was this thing about bathtubs. I like it now because I’d never before seen this idiom “to make shift”, but I doubt this was what first caught my eye. Maybe the makeshift was more familiar to me then. Hunters are supposed to stay unwashed when they go into the wild. Soap scares off game, so says my cousin who hunts for all kinds of things in his woods on the banks of the Missouri River. And we both hate to waste running water, so we turn off the tap.

Barbarians r us

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

-Constantine Cavafy

But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians…Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters.

-J.M. Coetzee

Que barbaridad!

-Emma Nunez, Arequipa, Peru, 1973, said about her husband Tomas when he came home drunk late at night

For the Egyptians call all men barbarians who do not speak the same language as themselves.

-Herodotus, The Histories

There is a commonly perceived thin line between civilization and barbarity in marriage just as there is in foreign affairs and matters of national security. Those outside our gates, our hedge rows, our shores, our marital bed. But how to tell us from them? By skin color…vocabulary that is considered either polite or impolite…Knowing the soup spoon from the salad fork from the fish knife…

Emma considered Tomas’ kisses to be barbaric when he’d been drinking pisco, as she told me at the breakfast table the next morning when she would often, because she was feeling gaseous and wanted to be well mannered in the presence of a gringo guest, turn her head away and let out a lady-like belch. I shared a room with their eight year old son, our bed room was beside theirs separated by a curtain, so yes, I can say that there was indeed a thin line between civilization and barbarity in Arequipa that summer.

Egyptians didn’t like me not knowing the difference between the words aywa and na’am. Both mean yes, each used at different times. My Arabic improved over the 12 months I lived in Cairo and near the end of my stay I had a conversation on the street with someone who thought I was Lebanese, because of my accent he told me. No, he didn’t think that I was a khawaja, a European foreigner, a word that when used by an Egyptian often made me feel like a barbarian, but rather that I was an Arab. In that case, I seemed to fall on the civilized side of the line. My Arabic had become a little less barbaric at least in one man’s eyes.

In Peru just as in Egypt I don’t believe that I ever became a solution. I always felt more like a problem, especially whenever I opened my mouth. But I plead guilty to being perceived as a barbarian from time to time, and it is probably even more true today, when all an American has to do is to show their passport, than it was yesterday, when we had to incorrectly say aywa instead of na’am to an Egyptian, and thus sound terribly barbaric in their most civilized of languages.

Beau Geste from Camel Back

Where we were going, we neither knew nor cared. That it would be a grueling murderous march, we knew and did not care…Anyhow, it seemed the best thing to do, but how I longed for a camel!

-Beau Geste, Percival Christopher Wren

The dramatic story of the French Foreign Legion, where men hid from the law or from a woman- but never from death!

-from the cover of the 35 cent Pocket paperbook edition

I had heard them all. When I told friends I planned to ride a camel from Sudan to Egypt, I heard all the names of those who had already beat me to it, or something like it…Marco Polo…Ibn Battuta…Lawrence of Arabia. And the same lame jokes…Ship of the Desert…Arab Seamen…One hump or two.

I knew nothing of any of that when I was little. But if I had only pulled a book off the downstairs shelf, I might have discovered a cheesy paperback’s 1939 movie-inspired cover art of Gary Cooper as Michael “Beau” Geste in French foreign legion kepi, polished black boots, and blue tunic kissing Susan Hayward (but hadn’t he done this nine years earlier in the film Morocco, kissed Marlene Dietrich, with fade out as she follows him on that “grueling murderous march“ across the sands, barefoot with high heels in hand?), and thus encountered my first Saharan cliche. Lucky that edition was published before the movie’s 1966 remake with Leslie Nielsen and Telly Savalas, on whose Algerian sun-scorched bald-pate Nielsen could have fried an egg.

Too bad none of the movie adaptations were made on site. The original 1929 silent was intended to be shot in Algeria but trouble in the Riff moved production to Burlingame, California. Yuma, Arizona and a sand pit near Dorset, England made do for the following 3 remakes.

David made the only French foreign legion gesture on our trip. He sewed a handkerchief to the back of his baseball cap as a nape veil. I made do by popping my shirt collar. A turban would have worked well too. Or a foulard.

Can Publius Ovidius Naso Say, MĂMĂLIGĂ VĂ Rog?

But no one in Tomis speaks my tongue, and for nearly a year now I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. I communicate like a child with grunts and signs, I point, I raise my eyebrows, questioning, I burst into tears of joy if someone- a child even- understands what I am trying to say.

-An Imaginary Life, David Malouf

Corn polenta smothered in sour cream, feta, and butter would have made Ovid feel right at home. Some say that the word mămăligă originates from the Latin mamilla, nipple, so it was as close to his mother’s milk and tongue as one can get without pointing and unbuttoning her blouse. The Romanian etymologist Bogdan Hasdeu’s authoritative dictionary however gives the word a pre-Romance Dacian source, which makes sense because before New World maize was introduced to the Lower Danube, the Dacians were eating millet mămăligă long before the Emperor Trajan latinized them in the second century’s first years.

No mămăligă is seen being made or eaten in Trajan’s Column’s spiraled scenes depicting his victory in the Romanian Wars, but Ovid in his Black Sea Letters says that he wrote poems in the Dacian, or Getic as he called it, language- a lost Thracian tongue, so mămăligă , the word and the polenta both, were presumably on his lips during his ten years of exile.

We were walking around the outside of the National Museum in Constanţa, modern Tomis, and found a funerary stele memorializing a man named Lilis. He could not have been of my wife’s same family, for they arrived on the Euxine Sea only in the 20th Century, and not in Tomis but rather in another Greek colony, ancient Callatis.

This stele is not far from the main square’s statue of Ovid with his self-written epitaph- Be not severe, Lover, as you pass by, say “Easy may the bones of Ovid lie”- inscribed on the base, from Book III of the Tristia, which carries a bit of unintended embarrassment to the city, because its previous lines go like this…”How do you think I feel, lying here in a vile place among Getics and Sarmatians? I can’t stand the climate, I’m not used to the water, and the land itself, I don’t know why, displeases. There’s no house suitable for the sick, no food that’s any use…” Mămăligă , Vă Rog!