Words.
If a picture paints a thousand words, how many pictures can 250 words show? Words. is a project that aims redefine experience as not just something that is seen, but also something that is felt and smelt; something tased and touched.
The ‘pictures’ start in Paris, but then follow me as I travel across Greece, Turkey and Lebanon. This is not a travel blog, it’s not a diary and it’s definitely not poetry. It’s my own way of forcing myself to lower my attention filters, pay attention to what’s going on around me and see how I can translate what I absord into words.
15th Arrondisement, Paris — 7/4/19
Words drawled and sometimes guttural make the air thick and warm
- “Oui, monsieur?”
The red wine is cold and feels spicy and tannin-y. It puts clay on my breath and blood in my head and mixes with last night’s to dissolve me into the room
The girl I wanted to see isn’t here
There is another. Plain, less assured than the men she works with. I wonder how mine would seem- maybe she doesn’t work here at all
The waistcoat and white shirt sag a little on the waiter guarding the terrace. He was once big; he’s still tall. This is not a new job for him
Lazy conversation modulates like a sine wave
- “Merci, au revoir!”
Musicians arrive. And leave without playing
Two parents explain what their daughter knows they can’t understand. Her arms folded to defend herself against their patience. Eventually a compromise is reached. Arms relax
There is no music, but the barista snaps an unknown beat at intervals to empty his portafilter. Dirty plates clack upon collection; different from the clean clink of hot cups being stacked
fingers strum tea spoons in a drawer
It’s busier now.
Notre Dame, Paris — 15/4/19
You can tell this is important because it’s one of those nights when the rules stop applying: city bikes and electric scooters are scattered as if abandoned mid-journey, and people walk with impunity across ordinarily congested roads.
The crowd are still gasping as more parts of the roof collapse; later this panic distils into numbed disbelief. From Île Saint-Louis, the church has a halo of white spotlight and firehose water, but the glowing red looks raw and sore and mixes uglily with the shimmering gold and orange reflection of Paris’ lights on the Seine.
Parisians, usually so demure, wear their emotion unguarded. Wet eyes reflecting how much this symbol is as much a part of their personal identity as their city’s history. Spontaneous applause occasionally breaks out and on a bridge a crowd gathers to sing hymns. A powerfully built priest in a long black tunic and clutching rosary beads comes. He towers over the crowd, but stays removed from the centre, wanting to impose neither the strength of his voice nor the depth of his grief. People edge to get photos. Somewhere in the refrain was chez nous, which means “our home”.
Midnight. We move closer, navigating our way over python-like firehoses. Their urgent vibration suggesting that even the water is rushing to rescue the church. Implausibly, we see head torches flashing from inside the towers as firefighters swivel through the wreckage.
At 2am I leave the Parisians to their vigil.
Exarcheia, Athens — 29/4/19
The hungry eye of mass tourism slouches its lazy attention from the Parthenon to the streets where protestors- veterans of nine years of struggle- make me feel pudgy, privileged and part of the problem. Weaponizable flag poles and military grade gas masks mean we are disinclined to refuse their demand to stop taking photos: Our insatiable tourist appetite for the commodification of experience met with obvious contempt.
A friend, recently moved here to work at the coal-face of climate activism, is exasperated by my optimism because he knows our progress is built on the stolen wealth of the future and the poor. Well-practiced megalomaniacal indolence sees his examples as aberrations instead of the results of a system that profits by making us grateful to afford what was already ours. Political marketing and technological soma probably stopping our minds from connecting the protests and his pleas for change.
In the evening we sit on ancient rocks polished slippery by 2.5 millennia of feet and weather and let the Acropolis dominate us. Golden light appears to radiate from jagged rocks, its literal monumental stature inspiring an Olympic awe in the power of gods and men and the philosophers between them.
Kadıköy, Istanbul — 5/5/19
An Imam’s voice drones from a loudspeaker for the overflow Friday midday crowd. Rows of men kneel on the footpath, facing the Mosque, and Mecca. I move to accommodate the growing mass while pedestrians are pushed into the bus lane. A handcart staffed by a poor young woman who looks Afghani or Iraqi- though she is not Muslim, so maybe Syrian- distributes prayer mats. Latecomers use cardboard boxes, shirts and eventually aprons.
Everything is encoded in rules, language and rituals I don’t understand. For locals, it is an unremarkable inconvenience, but the disorganised Tetris of the growing crowd is an impossibility in any place that I could feel native. Its speed keeps catching me off guard, and another four times I find myself either blocking or cornered by worshippers. The shape is approximately triangle: I count 35 men in its base, and estimate at least 50 between me and the point, giving it an area of about 750 men.
Punctuality and attention don’t seem to be important, but when the preaching starts the mood is reverent and the prayer humble. Individuals move with the under-water slow motion of something mechanical as they oscillate up and down in prayer. Their Imam’s singing melts dissonant movement into one organism and the men bow, kneel and kiss the ground with their foreheads in union.
An imperceptible change signals the end. The crowd dissipates and insulating bubble melts. The crunching, gurgling city suddenly rushes back to me and I go to catch the ferry.
EMINÖNÜ, ISTANBUL- 7/5/19
From the outsider’s perspective Istanbul is impossible to penetrate. It is cramped and sprawling, constipated and rushed. Ferries crisscross the Bosporus with haphazard clockwork that seems to leave only me worried about collisions. Races, religions and roots refract raucously. The city has the energy of a combustion engine.
Here, senses are beaten into submission: A dim underground pass is filled with the strobe lighting of a hundred Chinese toys spinning and lurching into themselves, while the shouting of ambitious street traders reverberates into a sonic hammer that pummels your attention. A high-ceilinged bazaar, lit softly with gold and orange, is almost silent in comparison, but its aromas plant the leaves of foreign teas and the fruits of unknown spices in your nostrils. Further on, in narrow streets people press and pressure around you while you navigate forward through human nooks.
Street water sellers are a necessary universality: They, and others, probably overcharge tourists, but the arbitrage seems more to reflect implicit market laws than personal greed. Smells change from street to street: The burnt wood of roasted chestnuts mixes with sticky fried fish and kebab, but cross the road and hot pollution is wafting through fresh salty sea air.
Trade animates the city. Hard, physical lives drag, pull and cajole makeshift carts uphill through roughshod streets; across curbs and traffic. The Bosporus is ploughed by oxidized tankers and cargo ships, creating furrows of waves, while droning foghorns make smaller boats seem like pilot fish scuttling around whales for protection.
CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY — 11/5/19
Sleepy muscles grumble against the road’s shallow incline as we yawn our way to the viewing point. Tributaries of people join the pre-dawn pilgrimage from hotels and hostels on side-roads.
The valley below would be a plausible setting for a Jedi village and the unusual geography, still a mystery to me, sends bulky stalagmite rock formations into the sky. When the rising sun hits them, they look like rock-salt lamps, reflecting light into a world that remains in the shadow of the plateaued mountain opposite. I’m reminded how rarely I’ve seen dawn.
A drone annoys everyone.
In the valley below engines ignite, sounding like a mechanical bee army. Balloons are lying on the ground, and watching them expand seems like a time-lapse of growing water melons. Air bulges into them rapidly, but their sheer size causes them to float slowly. We count 4, then 5; then many more. Now upright, they bulge together like mushrooms on a forest floor. The wind dances them against each other and they kiss — or fight — for space.
Once flying, the air becomes dense: There are now 16 in the air and at least three times that on the ground. One, suspended from nothing, spins with the steady trance of an object in space. The rest sail down the valley with the nobility of migrating elephants.
Well-armed tourists take a thousand photos in a hundred poses. They are shamelessly contrived, but the best are fun and creative. Sooner or later I crack and join in.
GÖREME, TURKEY — 11/5/19
Conspicuously avoiding English, a street trader greets me in several languages until I reply in French. Fascinated that I can do this, he cajoles me into his shop and proffers me a tiny stool.
I don’t ask how a man born in Turkey and raised in France can be called Barry. His French is chaotic and half-remembered and he often waits for me to fill gaps in his vocabulary and, more challenging, gaps in his train of thought. Dead silences last long seconds and I don’t know what to do. An already eccentric man, driven half-mad from boredom, he scolds my perceived lapses with uninhibited prods, pokes and slaps in and on all parts of my body.
I accept the first tea. The second is coerced, as are the biscuits, but I have to hide for fear his hated neighbour may discover Barry’s been lying for a week about his tea stock.
He shows me most of his phone’s photos, particularly the selfies with female tourists. He makes the cartoonish hip thrusts of a ten-year-old boy’s idea of sex while recounting an improbable story involving his cousin and a bakery.
Tourists come and I translate the sale — my role in the transaction baffling to them. I tease his reticence to reveal his profit margins, but as we complete another transaction, I’m suddenly proud have a local friend.
Inevitably, as with everything here, an impromptu photoshoot starts. He punches me until I pose with tea and my sunglasses.
RED VALLEY, CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY — 12/5/19
I am in a lush fissure of the cracked skin of a giant’s palm. It is a landscape that both time and reality have forgotten. The moon is wispy-white in the deep blue sky and looks like a neighbouring planet. Ancient cave homes- from what seems to be an undiscovered time- open geometrically from inside the valley walls. It’s like rolling Mt Rushmore and the Grand Canyon into one.
I feel like I’m exploring the — or a — new world. I am imperially lost and alone; emperor of my own small adventure. I am happy.
My backpack is heavy but fits snugly, and feels like it provides stability and balance when I have to scramble.
Hidden behind and under a rock outcrop is Muhammed in his empty, makeshift café. He asks if I have time and squeezes me orange juice. We talk and I sign his guestbook: “this is why I travel”.
Up, off the trail, I climb between high rocks into a patch of sun and stony grass. I lie down and smell, inexplicably but distinctly, lemon. Below people pass along on the trail without seeing me. Birds and flies, too busy to bother me, surround me in IMAX sound. Nature admonishes me to notice my freedom.
I eat a rough meal of mouthfuls of bread and chunks of cheese and whole cherry tomatoes. I guzzle half the water from one bottle, and repeat with another, so that my backpack will be balanced. I pack and continue again.
A YACHT, MEDITTERREAN SEA — 16/5/19
I don’t know if it’s the heaving sea or the piercing wind that wakes me. The peach sun seems to be debating with itself whether it really wants to get up out of the cosy warm glow of dawn. I’m freezing.
The wind searches and probes, like a conscious thing and finds every gap in my double layered, disorganised blankets. Each crevice becomes a howling gap starts me shivering. I battle to grasp my sleepiness in hand while arranging the blankets with the other. The sea is so heavy it’s a struggle to stay balanced, even lying down.
I’m stiff, cosy, sore and sleepy and I keep up the fight until the effort forced me awake. I don’t understand how the others can sleep so well on the deck, but I open the cabin hatch, stuff my gear below and follow it down and into my warm, heaving bunk.
ADANA, TURKEY — 20/5/19
Adana kebab makes western kebab look like the abstract of an academic paper: All the main inputs are there (tomato, bread, meat, onion, parsley), the results are the same — but there’s no appreciation of the work done, nor of its beauty when someone lays it out for you.
I’m sitting at the timid edge of an eight-person table, which like all the others in the restaurant is empty. But the waiter is spreading out large starters for each place, as if a wedding is booked.
I watch the TV uncomprehendingly. There’s a live panel interview on what looks similar to a New Year’s Evening Special. There’s a game-show like dashboard in the corner of the screen, ticking off cities when their assigned time is reached. Eventually I realise all the hungry eyes of Islamic Turkey must be glued to that list, waiting for their Ramadan fast to end in their city. One panellist looks like an American sports star, his baseball cap and head mike incongruous to my conception of Islam.
Everyone shakes hands with the guy at the door as they walk in, waiting patiently for sunset here. Devoutly unreligious — and stuffed, I’m a sullied intruder and leave.
I walk past empty sweet shops and food stalls. The only foreigners here seem to be me and about 600,000 refugees, but the locals just built the Turkey’s biggest Mosque, so the Ramadan economics of these shops, like so much in this country, remains a mystery to me.
BEIRUT, LEBANON — 24/5/19
The sun hits me- and then keeps hitting me — with the brutality of the middle east. I bake for four minutes, waiting for a flashing orange traffic light to change before registering it probably never does; the government reconciling itself to the futility of trying to control this havoc. With real nervousness, I force myself into the naked vulnerability of a pedestrian in Beirut.
Chaos is replaced by soulless sterility amongst downtown’s Lego towers. This toy town feels like it was simply bulldozed on top of the rubble of a civil war that doesn’t look over.
Concrete is everywhere: Roughly poured, thick, utilitarian slabs of it. It chokes off roads, strong-arms people away from government buildings and creates brutalist walls that make embassies look like military bases in hostile cities. On some roads, concrete pill boxes are more common than traffic lights. The shells of buildings and towers, riddled with bullets and bombs, are concrete too.
I realise how ugly war must be.
Locals scorn the old bullets and new soldiers alike. Like every pressurized society, there is an outlet. Here it’s art and nightlife.
A street boy puts himself in my path and I give him two dollars, but ignore his sister. I see her hurt and I spend the next 200 metres searching for my justification. When I don’t find one, I turn back and find her.
I give the little Syrian girl, not old enough to have known peace or home, two dollars too.
ADNOIS VALLEY, LEBANON — 28/5/19
A new flock of chickens is jumpy: One unexpected flutter can transform their jerky, nervous vibration into a panic that is absolute, complete and perfect in the mindlessness of its terror. There is no communication, no society and no order. A flock is a collection of individuals eating, drinking, shitting and laying eggs. They seem resolutely stupid.
But yesterday, somehow, one escaped. The whole flock frenzied in desperate barking, willing it on, away from its captors and its coop. We trapped it against two walls, but it to flung itself above, onto the next ledge. You could almost see its pupils dilate with wild adrenaline and the part of me that hates oppression willed it on too.
With a frantic, split-second decision it crashed and caught in thick undergrowth. The foreman, an experienced jailor, took advantage of the error with cold ease. He detained it in a cruel clench, holding the wings high and behind, and frogmarched it away. Its anguished panic anything but mindless now.
I watched all this from below, sneezing stupidly.
Later I was reluctant to enter the coop to collect the eggs, fearing retribution and realising then that I feared the one animal whose name and noise even children use to describe cowardice.
GROGANS, DUBLIN — 10/6/19
“Take a pew!” says the barman to newcomers, his Dublin reared vowels elongated and curved with the gracefulness of a Liffey bridge.
The secret of a good pub is whispered in the smooth, hushing gush of pouring Guinness. Everyone here knows this, as they know the virtue of temperance in waiting for a pint to settle; or, once set, the sin of starting one with a sip or a sup: They know you pull on a pint of stout.
My first pull is cold, creamy, wholesome, deep and I’m quick to take a second. I hold it in my mouth, feeling it solid, like the bite of an ice-cream- creamy butter on top, chocolate coffee on bottom. It takes three gulps to swallow.
Halfway through the head gives way to the more bitter and watery black stuff. Residue decorates the glass like the smashed surf of an Atlantic wave on West of Ireland rock.
The retired couple say “jesus” and then, “jaysus” when the barman finishes a story about his bandaged hand.
Personal preference may dictate where your best pint is, but nobody would begrudge the pub’s toasties: lashings of ham and cheese, butter galore. The kind your granny or neighbour used to make- or your mam, if you were sick.
Characters come and go. Groups foreground themselves and then fade, I catch snatches of banter, politics, scandal- and the Brits, but details sink into the walls. Stories meander, wander, tangle and drift across tables- epics of the everyday.
