Rastaman in Barbados

Sometimes a holiday has to stand for more than just rest and relaxation. By the middle of the nineties, my marriage was floundering. Following a huge row, I left our home on a Sunday evening for a week-long training course, convinced that the whole thing was over. But during a telephone conversation a few days later, my wife suggested we take a holiday and try to see if we could put Humpty Dumpty together again. Her mother would take the children so that we could have the time for ourselves – time to see if we could take all that was good, all that was strong and deep between us, rediscover its value together and put our relationship, functioning, back on the road.

Late winter/early spring is not the best time to look for warm holiday destinations in Europe. But my wife had visited the Caribbean as a girl and had good memories of one particular holiday there and so in March 1995 we found ourselves crossing the Atlantic, our plane stopping to refuel in Newfoundland, on the way to Barbados.

Barbados is the most eastern island in the Caribbean, belonging geographically to the island group known as the Lesser Antilles. It is small (166 sq. miles) and quite densely populated (284.000 inhabitants). Historically a British possession, with an economy based on sugar cane, today it is independent and its major industry is tourism.

Coming from Europe and (I suspect) from the North American continent, the first thing you have to get used to when you arrive in the Caribbean is that time is simply different there. It moves somehow more slowly, languidly. It probably has a lot to do with the balmy temperatures which prevail nearly all the time but I think some of it also comes from the basic attitude to life which seems to be part of the general philosophy of the people who live there. I remember someone who knew Trinidad well once trying to explain it to me with hoary old racist stereotypes about black people being prepared to sit under coconut trees enjoying the sunshine instead of getting up off their asses to do something.

The sad thing about that particular cliché is that it does contain a grain of truth, wrapped up in a huge mantle of prejudice and misunderstanding. The history of the black people (the vast majority of the inhabitants) of the Caribbean is one of hundreds of years of slavery, followed by a further period of notional freedom but systematic continued exploitation by an elite white minority up to around fifty years ago. This kind of experience isn’t exactly conducive to identification with all the values of a system which that elite has used to keep you down, and from which the colour of your skin more or less automatically shuts you out. In fact, independent states of the Caribbean (like Trinidad, Jamaica, the Bahamas, St. Lucia, Barbados, etc.) have generally been doing pretty well since their colonial masters pulled out. (Exceptions like Haiti and Cuba can arguably place most of the blame for their major problems since independence on their former [colonial] masters.)

What the people of the Caribbean do seem to have learned from their history is a certain relaxed attitude to life, an attitude which sees time as the servant of people and not the other way around. You may have to wait a little longer for service in a shop here, but this isn’t because the salesperson doesn’t respect you; rather it’s because (s)he is taking lots of time for every customer, which may include a longer conversation with the person who is ahead of you. Things seem to move more slowly, because there is a feeling that life continuously offers spontaneous small pleasures, pleasures which are there to be savoured. It is, therefore, perhaps not coincidental that the most beloved relic of British colonial rule in the Caribbean is the game of cricket, in which the West Indies are a world power, and where the time for a game is measured in days, not hours. Yet, within the relaxed framework of a cricket game, there are occasions where speed is important, even vital, and anyone who claims that things in the Caribbean are just too slow should just take a look at Usain Bolt.

At any rate, I will admit that, while I found the laid-back, friendly atmosphere in Barbados very pleasant, I experienced some difficulties in adjusting my own attitude to it. I had started an extremely demanding job the year before and it wasn’t easy to just leave it behind me – in my head, I mean. But far more than that, the future of my marriage was also at stake in these two weeks, and this was overshadowing everything else.

One afternoon in the course of the first few days there, somewhere in the middle of the interminable negotiations involved in that summit meeting of hearts, I found myself on my own, walking down Dover Road towards St. Lawrence Gap. Maybe there’d been a row, maybe my wife was just taking a nap, I don’t remember any more. The sun was shining, it was warm, walking was like wading through warm treacle. I seem to remember that I was heading towards the nearest supermarket, probably to pick up a six-pack of Banks beer.

I’m sure I was instantly recognisable as a tourist from Europe or North America; white, slightly sunburnt, obviously preoccupied with my own important affairs. Suddenly I heard a voice calling out to me.

“Hey, mon! How are you, mon?”

I looked around. There was a Rasta-man, sitting on a low wall in the shade.

Fuck it, I thought to myself, I just don’t feel like this shit! All he wants is to hassle me, probably beg a few dollars, or maybe engage me in a discussion about how the white man and Babylon had oppressed the children of Jah. I really don’t need this …

“Hey mon! Doan you wanna talk to I? What’s your problem, mon?”

Damn it! If I just ignore him he might get nasty. I’ve heard that these brothers can get quite aggressive, although it’s supposed to much better in Barbados than in Jamaica.

“No problem, I’ve just got something to do, that’s all. Bit of a hurry …”

“What’s the hurry, mon? Come over here a minute. Need to talk to you, my friend.”

Reluctantly I went over to him. He patted the wall beside him. I sat down.

“So, you’re on holiday, hey? You enjoying yourself? You like Barbados?”

I admitted that I found Barbados very pleasant, very nice.

“So why you look so stressed, my friend? You wanna carry all the cares of the world on your shoulders? I thought you were on holiday. You need to lighten up a bit.”

He looked at me keenly and grinned, his strong white teeth shining warmly, and sang a snatch of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right …”

Then he laughed, free and spontaneous, and clapped me on the shoulder.

Even now, I find it hard to describe the feeling that came over me then. It was a strange combination of shame, relief and insight. Caught up in my stereotypical, suspicious, white-bred, first-world superiority, I had misjudged this Rasta-man very badly and I felt ashamed for it. I felt relief, for my feeling of threat was gone and I realised that I was on holidays and didn’t have to carry all my worries around with me. This feeling moved into insight as it became clear to me that, despite all the problems I had to deal with, the world, the day, the moment here and now was beautiful and that, somehow, every little thing was gonna be all right.

We chatted easily after that for a couple of minutes. He asked me about my sunburn and gave me some aloe vera, showing me how to break the thick leaf and rub it on my leg, the cool gel-like sap soothing my irritated skin immediately.

“There’s an answer for everything in nature, mon,” he told me. “Aloe vera is good for sunburn. Even for I-and-I. ‘Cause, you know, the black man can get sunburn too, maybe not so easily, but it can happen.”

He asked me where I was from, how long I was going to stay and wished me all the best for my holiday.

“Now you go on, bro’, and do whatever it is you were going to do. And just remember … Don’t worry about a thing …”

I grinned back at him and we finished the line of the song together.

“…’Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right.”

And so I went my way.

* * *

The holiday, for me, really started after that encounter. My wife and I completed our summit of hearts with a treaty of forgiveness and new beginnings. It didn’t ultimately save the marriage which irrevocably broke down three years later, but, in retrospect, that breakdown was unavoidable. The burden of mutual hurt and the fundamental differences between us led to a situation where we both had to accept, as the German saying puts it, “better a horrible end than horror without end.”

But back then, in March 1995, that was in the future. For the present, we still had the best part of two weeks in Barbados and it turned out to be a wonderful holiday. Thanks in no small part, as far as I’m concerned, to that Rastafarian who helped me get my head straight.

A moment of overstanding where I-and-I learned to aprecilove irie!

Pictures retrieved from:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Lawrence_Gap,_Christ_Church-16.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rasta_rules_485080279.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aloe_Vera.jpg

Holiday Fragments

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed an almost three week long hiatus. The reason for this was simple; I had holidays and had decided, as far as possible, to take a break from everything, including writing.

While it is possible to take a break and even recharge one’s personal batteries while staying at home, in common with most people I find this easier to do if I travel, go somewhere else. The tyranny of regular routine, post and telephone and things that – apparently – have to be done is strong, and the only way to really switch it off (at least in my case) is to just go somewhere else and leave it all behind. And so, for the last week of my time off work, together with my daughter and grandson, I spent a week on the Turkish Aegean coast – back to the same village we enjoyed so much last year.

It was a week I spent – by and large successfully – not thinking about things, living in and relishing the succession of pleasant moments. Switching off is not something that comes easily to me, though I know that it does me good and I would be better off if I could do it more often. Now that I am back in the normal routine of life, I find that my impressions and memories of the week solidify around fragments, particular thoughts, incidents and observations around which the rest of that week, so different from the norm, accretes.

I. Airplane behaviour; Cause and Effect

It takes nearly three hours to fly from Cologne to Izmir and we did it in the middle of the night, arriving into the balmy warmth of the Eastern Mediterranean early in the morning. As the plane came to a halt, I observed with my customary bemusement the behaviour of most of my fellow travellers. The moment the plane stopped moving, the majority of them immediately jumped out of their seats, rummaged in the overhead bins for their hand luggage and then spent five minutes standing in the aisles, impatiently waiting for the umbilical corridor to connect with the cabin door, for okays to be given from both sides so that that that door can finally be opened and the process of debarkation can begin. As always, I refused to let myself become infected by what I have always considered to be an unthinking, senseless herd instinct. With a feeling of bored, tired superiority I regarded their pointless, uncomfortable anticipation. Getting out of the plane as quickly as possible does nothing whatsoever to speed up the process of getting out of the airport; after all, we’re all going to spend at least ten minutes (if we’re lucky!), having gone through the immigration process, waiting for our bags and suitcases to be finally spit out of the entrails of the airport onto the baggage carousel.

And then, prompted perhaps those strange twists of consciousness caused by an acute lack of sleep, I had a strange idea, maybe even a mad insight. What if the course of events composing the debarkation process is in fact different to what I have always thought? Could it be that those five minutes of impatient jostling in the aisle of the aeroplane do in fact have a purpose? Maybe the standing and waiting is a necessary part of the procedure of debarkation. Without the signal given by the passengers that they are willing and eager to leave the plane perhaps the corridor would never dock with the plane, the doors remain forever closed.

The door of our plane finally opened and we were able to continue on our way to our holiday. Thanks to the passengers, whose standing up had given those responsible the signal that they could let us out of the plane?  Maybe I should be grateful to them.

II. You Can’t do That with a Kindle!

I might have consciously decided to voluntarily cut myself off from the internet for my week in Club Atlantis, but that didn’t mean I had joined the digital Luddites – far from it. Instead of packing my suitcase with kilos of books to make sure that I didn’t run out of stuff to read (the idea of being on holiday without something to read is something I don’t even want to imagine), this time I brought my Kindle. With Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy and the last three books of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series   I was confident that I had more than enough material to see me through the week.

It’s still relatively early in the year and we were blessed with a location directly on the Aegean coast (the beach around 200 metres from our chalet) with a wonderfully refreshing sea breeze, but the weather was warm and the odd mosquito was already buzzing around. They weren’t generally a problem, as our chalet was equipped with both mosquito netting on the windows and air conditioning. But despite all this, one evening, a couple of days after our arrival, a lone mosquito found its way into our rooms. Luckily, Lara and I heard the whine of his flight and spotted him before he managed to draw any blood.

Now I’m a fairly tolerant kind of guy, but that tolerance comes to a quick end when I’m threatened by these little bloodsuckers. If they would leave me alone, I’d leave them alone too, but my particular variety of blood seems to make me an irresistible target for the winged bastards. So I’m prepared to strike first, strike hard, and f*** the damage to my karma. I had only one problem. What was I going to kill it with?

Lara and I looked at the Kindle in my hand and the old-fashioned paperback in hers. She marked her page, handed me the book and, with one well-aimed swing, I mashed the little bugger onto the wall.

Lara grinned at me, “You can’t do that with a Kindle!”

III The Obsessions of Little Boys

One of the pleasures of this holiday – though occasionally accompanied by an inevitable soupcon of chaos and stress J – was the chance to spend a week with my five-year-old grandson. It was an opportunity to observe at close quarters a world I left so long ago, that of a little boy. As I don’t have sons, the distance is one of nearly fifty years.

For over a year now, one of the most important figures in Ryan’s life is a certain Lightning McQueen. The anthropomorphic automotive hero of the Disney Cars is a frequent topic of conversation and, apart from the films on DVD, he also has a large number of model cars, T-shirts, sandals, a jacket, pyjamas, a bath towel, and heaven knows what else, all sporting motives and images from the films.

Three little boys meet at the hotel swimming pool:

“Wow! He’s got models of Lightning and Mater.”

“Cool!”

“I’ve got Finn McMissile in my room. You push the boot and two machine guns pop up out of the bonnet. You want to see it?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, I’ll bring it with me this evening when we come to dinner. Maybe we can play Cars there …”

“Cool!”

Boys! When I think about it, in fifteen years time the only thing that will have changed is that the cars are real.

I’m holding forth on the subject of perfidious Disney, the corporation’s eagerness to exploit the images which fascinate children by marketing everything imaginable and thus pull millions and millions out of the pockets of all those who have anything to do with kids, pestered and nagged into buying all these products with which those kids are confronted at every turn.

As I’m really getting into my stride, a recollection surfaces from my magpie-like memory, a recollection nearly half a century old. I’m six years old, writing a letter to Santa Claus. My biggest wish for Christmas is a model of the amazing car driven by my favourite TV character – the Batmobile.

The marketing may have become more pervasive, the range of products expanded, but otherwise, how much has really changed?

At any rate, I have seen some signs that Lightning McQueen may be facing a new rival. His new swimming-togs, proudly worn every day at the pool, featured Smiling Stan Lee’s most famous creation … Spider-man.

* * *

All too soon the holidays are over and I’m back in my normal routine. Spidey has taken off his costume and returned to his real identity of Peter Parker. And although I won’t deny that there was a slight touch of resentment in my feelings as I returned to work yesterday, at the same time I know that continuous holidays would quickly pall. It is the fact that they are an exception, a time away from the normal, the routine which them so special, so precious. Peter Parker is the norm, Spider-man the exception. Though personally, I prefer taking a few weeks in the sun to spending my “exceptional” time as a superhero rescuing the world. That would be far too strenuous and, as Spider-man frequently finds out, you don’t even get much thanks for it as a rule.

Pictures retrieved from:

https://ipotours.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/64-crowded-airplane.jpg

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0051QVF7A/ref=famstripe_k

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/27/LightningMcQueen.jpg/250px-LightningMcQueen.jpg

Holiday Snapshots (2): F-16s, Derrida and Little Boys

Snapshot 3: Knock, knock, knocking on Europe’s Door

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m lying beside the pool in the warm Aegean sun, thinking of nothing in particular and enjoying the experience. Then there’s a distinctive space-filling roar and a fighter-plane zooms across the sky. I remember that noise – we had it regularly in Western Germany up to the fall of the wall – and, looking up, I see the familiar form of an F-16 to the west, flying south.

Many others follow that day. I wonder idly whether World War III has broken out and I (blissing out in holiday lotus-eater land) haven’t heard anything about it. Thinking about it a bit more, I realise that they could also be flying off to try to make Ghadaffi’s life in Libya a bit more uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s just a day of training flights and the Turkish air force is taking a testosterone fuelled regular opportunity to remind the Greeks that they are there. It wouldn’t be all that surprising; these are two countries not exactly in love with each other, even if they both share a common NATO membership.

On a large general scale, the history of Europe from Neolithic times to the Middle Ages can be seen against the background of repeated large movements of peoples, generally from the East to the West. Many of the nations and peoples now inhabiting areas of Europe originally came from somewhere else, including the various Celtic peoples (from Scotland to Galicia in Spain), Anglo-Saxons, Franks (French), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Albanians and most (if not all) of the Slavic peoples. These recurrent waves of invasion (often called by the German term Volkerwanderung), while often giving rise to great upheavals and chaos (the most famous being the collapse of the Roman Empire), eventually led to the settlement and integration of the newcomers within the general European culture.

With one exception – the last wave. Around 950 years ago, the Seljuk Turks erupted into Anatolia, temporarily replacing the hegemony of Constantinople over most of Asia Minor. They were eventually pushed back but their successors, the Ottoman Turks, succeeded in taking over all of Anatolia, finally capturing Constantinople in 1453, thus putting an end to the Greek culture which had dominated much of the area now known as Turkey for two thousand years.

Experts believe that the various groups described as Turkic peoples had their origins around the Altai mountains in Central Asia, where Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan come together. Like many other groups of steppe nomads they moved westwards. Having conquered Byzantium, the Ottomans continued to push westwards, conquering Greece and most of the Balkans and, under Suleiman the Magnificent (1494 – 1566), even besieging Vienna in 1529.

Suleiman’s Empire was one of the most civilized areas in the world at the time – it is, therefore, somewhat ironic that his push west is one of the major components of the western European stereotype of the Turks as bloodthirsty savages. On the one cloudy day of our holiday, Lara (my daughter) and I walked through the ruins of a fortress he had built in Sığacık as part of his campaign to throw the militant order of church knights, whose piracy in the Aegean was seriously annoying him, out of Rhodes. He succeeded and they moved their base to another Mediterranean island to become the Knights of Malta.

Turkey has been an associate member of the EU since 1963 and its formal application to join the Union as a full member is now 24 years old. Negotiations are creeping on interminably and, despite all sorts of official statements of positive intent, it does not look like they will be brought to a conclusion at any time in the foreseeable future. Opinion polls show a majority against Turkish accession within the EU. Put brutally and bluntly, it seems that Europe does not really want Turkey – never did and never will. The ongoing difficulties regarding the integration of large sections of the immigrant Turkish communities in many Western European countries are not helping.

In the end, I suspect a large component of the problem Europe has had, and still has with Turkey has to do with the fact that the country is overwhelmingly Muslim, despite its constitutional structure as a secular republic installed by Ataturk (and under the moderate Islamist Erdogan – Turkey’s current Prime Minister – sometimes brought into question). If the Turks had embraced the Byzantine Christ rather than Muhammad’s Allah, I believe that they would have been accepted as Europeans long ago. Recent polls in Turkey show a cooling of enthusiasm among Turks for the whole EU project. Can you really blame them?

I’m not sure. I have my own problems with Islam and many attitudes identified with Islamic culture. Still, as far as EU accession goes, even from a realpolitik point of view, I’m inclined to remember Lyndon Johnson’s aphorism about it being better to have someone you’re not completely sure of inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. Even as a tourist visiting the country, I have seen enough to realise that it is a complex, sometimes contradictory mix of modernity and tradition, Islam and secularism. And very many lovely, friendly, very welcoming people, who are almost pathetically grateful if you manage to stammer out even merhaba [hello] or tesekür ederim [thank you] in their own language.

Snapshot 4: Derrida, Différance and Four Year Old Boys

It is afternoon and once more I’m lying by the pool. Occasionally I’m active enough to read a few pages of a Peter F. Hamilton science fiction novel, but most of the time I simply lie with my eyes closed or watch my grandson playing with some other children he has met here. Lara is more productive. She has an oral exam on deconstruction coming up next month and is reading Derrida.

“I think I understand what he’s saying all right,” she says. “Basically, everything is already a construction – in that sense, you can’t get beyond the ‘text’, because even language itself is a construction.”

“That’s what I like so much of the game he plays with the word différance. There’s the inference in it that meaning is always deferred, you never really get to the “thing-in-itself” Husserl was always looking for. It’s always interpretation. And then there’s always difference as well …”

“That goes even farther,” she breaks in. “The word différance is an invention of Derrida’s. It sounds the same as the French différence, it’s only when you see it written that you realise that it’s something else. He uses this to show how words themselves are already a construction. He even says that you find different meanings every time you reread a text.”

“We create our own meaning,” I say. “Individually and communally. In that sense, Derrida’s thinking follows on that of Camus. Interesting, that; Camus was a pied noir too, an Algerian Frenchman, just like Derrida. I wonder if that’s a train of thought worth pursuing …

If you ask me, most of this kind of stuff is only a footnote on Kant anyway. He was the one who initially posited our field of meaning as existing in the phenomenon, the point of meeting between the “thing-in-itself” and “subjective” perception. Husserl and Heidegger went on from that, as did the French existentialists …”

“Papa, maybe you should do the exam instead of me. You can talk about this kind of stuff much better.”

“Talk? Waffle, you mean. Anyway, I already have my degree in philosophy. Besides, if I were to impersonate you I’d have to shave my beard and I’m not doing that!

You’ll do fine. All you have to do is just throw about the slogans and palaver. That’s what most continental philosophers do anyway; it’s one of the reasons why the British analysts get so annoyed with them. Though they’re just as bad in their own way.”

I look at Ryan – her four year old son, my grandson. He’s having a great time with two other little boys, the three of them chasing each other around the pool, whooping with delight. Right now, Ryan has joined forces with Leo, who’s French. They call out excitedly to each other. The fact that they don’t understand each other’s languages doesn’t seem to bother them. They’re having fun and, at four, you don’t let something like a language barrier get in the way of that.

Lara is watching them too. We both smile.

“Look at them,” I say. “They don’t have any trouble communicating, even if they can’t use language. Maybe you just have to be four years old to finally get beyond the text …”

* * * * *

The holiday is now over and I’m back at work. If, as Derrida once said, all is context, then I’m now in another context, one I find, subjectively, a lot less pleasurable. And the EU is a context (or not) for Turkey and Turkey itself is a context for those who live and find their identity there. As it was for me, for a much too short week. Though if I am honest, part of the context which gave shape to the time I spent in Club Atlantis was its limited, temporary nature. The time-limited break from normal routine is one of the things which characterises the very idea of holiday. And there will, hopefully, be others in the future.

Photos by the author with the exception of:

http://www.condorinc.com/vulture/F16-2.jpg

Holiday Snapshots (1): Flying Pigs and the Wine-Dark Sea

“Well, I’m back.”

Sam Gamgee, The Return of the King

… And I’m not sure I want to be. Yesterday evening I returned after spending a week in Turkey – an isolated hotel on the Aegean coast, about 40 km south of Izmir. A week of complete relaxation with the biggest decisions being what to eat, or at which swimming pool to spend the afternoon.

I did take my netbook with me, with the vague intention of perhaps writing something, or logging onto the internet occasionally, just to check my mails, you understand. In the event, I did neither and the netbook was only briefly powered up a couple of times to transfer photos from my camera to the hard drive.

Checking my mail inbox yesterday evening – horrifically full after a week of being left to its own devices – I realised that it has been literally years since I have been removed from cyberspace for so long. What this says about my life, or modern life in general, I’m not sure; when I get my thoughts together about it, it may even prove a subject for a post here sometime in the near future. There are, for example, many mails which I should answer, particularly various comments on posts on this blog, which have been waiting patiently in my inbox for approval. As I write this, I am becoming uncomfortably aware that I am generally not as diligent about replying to comments as I should be – let this then function as a general apology to all those who take the time to comment on my offerings here; I do appreciate what you write and I am aware that the dialogues which comments give rise to are one of the most important aspects of blogging. It’s just that there are so many normal everyday tasks to do in the hectic hurly-burly of life that I don’t always get around to them all.

Which is one of the things which was so marvellous about the past week; getting so completely out of the everyday routine, using the opportunity afforded by a week’s holiday – a package “all-inclusive” deal which even relieves one of all burdens of decisions regarding holiday budgets because everything in the hotel is included in the price, including drinks from the various bars. Very quickly after arriving, I found myself switching into a profound relax, almost standby, mode, so that, even of the four books I (an inveterate, compulsive reader) had brought with me, I only managed to read one during the week. Although, on reflection, it wasn’t standby at all; rather it was a truly blessed opportunity to live intensively other levels of life, to lie in the warm Mediterranean sun, eyes closed, letting one’s thoughts idly meander by until one realises that one has, in fact, not been thinking at all, or to share the flow of life as experienced by my four-year-old grandson who, along with his mother, had accompanied me.

Bertrand Russell once wrote a marvellously intelligent essay titled In Praise of Idleness, which should be required reading for all thinking people. At the end of my holidays, I feel a sense of regret that his arguments have not gained more currency in our modern world and, at the same time, a small degree of satisfaction that, for a week at least, I have managed to experience some of the advantages of the mentality he suggests. But “normal” life is regaining its hold on me and so I find myself once more slowly knuckling under the various demands of routine – including my (entirely voluntary) self-chosen obligation to look after this blog. And, as I so succumbed to idleness in the past two weeks as to neglect to let my readers know how pleasant my holidays were, I will now provide some written snapshots of some of my experiences – virtual postcards, if you will, from Holidayland.

Snapshot 1: The Flying Pig

We were travelling very early in the season – the hotel was open for less than a week when we got there – so instead of flying on a charter flight full of sun-hungry Germans, the travel company had booked us on a regular flight from Düsseldorf to Izmir with the Turkish low-cost carrier, Pegasus Airlines. As a result, most of the passengers were Turkish, people travelling for all sorts of reasons between two international cities.

The low-cost air transport concept has revolutionised air travel in Europe in the past twenty years, making flying from one country to another something affordable for ordinary people rather than an expensive luxury. In my own case it has made visiting my Irish homeland something I can do for a few days a couple of times annually rather than a major expedition to be planned every second year or so. Though the major carriers like Ryanair or Easyjet are better known, Pegasus is the largest private Turkish airline with around 100 flights daily.

As I watched the plane preparing for the start at Düsseldorf airport, however, a very different thought struck me – one concerning the perils of choosing internet domain names and plastering them in large letters on your carriers and the advisability of having a few native English speakers among the people responsible for making such decisions. www.flypgs.com may seem a logical domain name for an airline called after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek legend, but I’m afraid the automatic connection my mind made was to place an i between the p and the g and immediately think of airborne bacon. A connection all the more unfortunate for a company operating out of a predominantly Muslim country.

The flight was pretty full. Directly across the aisle, a large, overweight Turkish man of around sixty took his place. He didn’t look particularly well; he was sweating and panting heavily. That part of me which is an experienced nurse automatically speculated about probable coronary heart disease and hoped that a few hours sitting down would provide him with some relief.

It didn’t. About an hour before we were due to land, he began to feel so unwell that he (or his companion) summoned a flight attendant. Shortly after that a call went out on the loudspeakers for a doctor or medical personnel. No doctor appeared so I offered my services. We got him into the flight attendants area (luckily we were both sitting at the front of the plane). Despite a pretty dark skin colour, he was looking pretty grey and gasping for breath. He spoke nothing but Turkish, the stewardess acted as interpreter between us. There was considerable chest discomfort (rather than real pain) and he indicated that he had gone through this kind of thing before so I guessed (and hoped) that he was having a pretty heavy attack of angina pectoris rather than a heart attack.

Some more questioning revealed that he had nitroglycerin spray in his pocket (thus confirming my suspicions about heart disease), so I gave him some of that. As we were in an airplane, I suggested to the attendants that we might be able to organise some oxygen for him and after some fumbling with the various connections between a portable tank and a mask we had him on two and a half litres per minute. The relief came quickly and after about fifteen minutes we could discontinue the oxygen and he went back to his seat quite happily. With the help of the stewardess, I gave him a lecture about the necessity of seeing a doctor as soon as possible because with these kinds of symptoms a heart attack is always looming. I can only hope he took my advice, as the last that I saw of him was him waiting for his luggage at the baggage carousel.

Snapshot 2: The Wine-Dark Sea

The Aegean is, of course, Homer country (or sea) par excellence and as I looked out over the small bay on which our hotel was situated, I found myself thinking of the Iliad. There is good evidence that Homer was born in Izmir (Smyrna) and Troy itself is only about a hundred miles north of Sığacık/Seferihisar where we were staying. During the long years of the Trojan War Achilles and his Myrmidons raided this coast repeatedly to put Priam’s allies under pressure and try to cut off the Trojan supply lines. It was on one of these raids that he took the beautiful Briseis prisoner, over whom his dispute with Agamemnon would have such catastrophic consequences.

Samos, just visible through the haze

We are used to thinking of history and geography in terms of landmasses and countries, but this is only one way of seeing things. The great French historian, Fernand Braudel, taught us another way of looking at the world in his masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Braudel looks at the whole Mediterranean as a cockpit of history and indeed sees it as many seas, “a vast, complex expanse.” One of its most historically laden components is the Aegean and there is a lot of justification for regarding ancient (and indeed Roman and Byzantine) Greece less as the Hellenic peninsula and more as all those lands and islands bordering and contained by the Aegean – a cultural unit which lasted for two thousand years before the Turks created a new reality for the region, less than a thousand years ago. Greek and Roman ruins are visible all through the coastal areas of Turkey and the ancient Greek city of Teos (one of the twelve members of the Ionian league) is within walking distance of our hotel. Looking south across the bay, the mountainous mass of the Greek island of Samos can clearly be seen through the haze. Indeed, until the Greco-Turkish war following World War I, there was still a sizable Greek minority (some even claim it was a majority) in the whole Smyrna/Izmir area and, if the Greeks had had their way, the area in which we made our holiday would today be part of Greater Greece. As it was, the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal succeeded in throwing the Greek forces out of all of mainland Anatolia in a war characterised by incidents of savagery and atrocities (“ethnic cleansing”) on both sides and the ultimate relocation of nearly two million people, three quarters of them Greek. And our hotel had no problem playing the Greek card with much of its décor, even going so far as to call itself Club Atlantis.

As to the wine-dark colour of the Aegean famously described by Homer, despite my best efforts I generally only managed to see many beautiful shades of blue. Once, seeing a darker shade probably caused by seaweed in the centre of the bay, I reflected that, with a bit – well, a lot – of charitable imagination, one might describe the quasi-purple colour resulting as wine-red. Maybe I just wasn’t fortunate enough to see it under the right lighting conditions.

“Rosy-fingered dawn” was another Homerian epithet I missed. Experiencing it would have meant getting up very early in the morning and I was on holiday. Being in relax mode, dawn wasn’t very high on my list of priorities anyway.

(to be continued …)

Photos by the author with the exception of:

http://www.flugzeug-bild.de/1024/pegasus-airlines-tc-aae-boeing-b737-82r-18047.jpg

Holiday postcards: Vincent van Gogh

I’ve been on holidays. Two weeks, and, at some time during the first couple of days, I decided to switch off a lot of routine and just relax. Which I’ve been doing and, for the record, it’s been very nice – among other things, I’ve been able to catch up with a lot of planned reading (including Parts 2 and 3 of Stieg Larrson’s Millenium trilogy, but that’s a subject for another post here). One of the things I’ve let fall into this switching off routine is posting here but now that my holidays are almost over it’s time to slowly find the way back to normal and pick up some strands of my ‘regular’ life again. Besides, I didn’t send any postcards and that just won’t do – so here they are!

I spent a week on the Dutch North Sea coast in Zandvoort. The weather was the way it can be at the beginning of May in Northern Europe, deciding that the time to proclaim summer wasn’t really here and therefore treating me to some rain and a sharp wind from the north which all served to make long walks on the strand … invigorating. So one day I took the train into Amsterdam to renew a pilgrimage I have made a number of times; to the van Gogh museum.

It’s easy to find the Museumplein in Amsterdam; if you’re feeling lazy you can take a tram directly (the 2 or the 5) from Centraal Station, otherwise it’s only about half an hour on foot. Around the corner from the Rijksmusuem, where all the Rembrandts and old masters can be seen, there’s a modern building which holds a major part of Vincent van Gogh’s work, mostly those works which his brother Theo had collected (Vincent wasn’t good at getting his paintings sold during his lifetime so the bulk of them, fortunately, finished up with Theo). This time I was struck by three particular pictures, all of them dealing with the same basic motif, from the last two years of his life and started wondering about how much we can tell of Vincent’s tortured inner life from the pictures which he painted.

That Vincent was increasingly plagued by mental illness is generally known, it finally led to his death two days after shooting himself in the breast in July 1890. The question which arises is, of course, how much his private purgatory can be traced in his works? A standard approach would be to see the artist’s growing mental conflict and confusion reflected in his paintings, the problem is that the pictorial record doesn’t allow us to easily do this. Vincent’s final years saw him at the pinnacle of his artistic achievement; technical and compositional mastery, unerring choice and working through of themes, productivity, visions of sublime beauty, a procession of awesome masterpieces. And at the same time, this artistic outpouring was accompanied by a continuing deterioration of his own subjective, inner balance, a deepening descent into the pit of personal misery and confusion which we helplessly call ‘madness’ (and the experts today still argue about the precise label for the mental disturbance under which van Gogh suffered), leading finally to his death.

Back to the pictures. Shortly after moving to Arles in 1888, Vincent painted a number of pictures of harvesting: http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=2607&collection=1282&lang=en

The Harvest is a detailed work of ordered composition, a picture of a world in which humans have tamed and regulated nature; reaped fields, ordered haystacks, fences, carts and farming equipment ready, diligent peasants finishing off the job. Even the hills in the background take a disciplined, bordering role in the whole work.

A year later, following a period sharing a house with Gauguin (during which the famous episode with the amputated ear also took place), Vincent was hospitalised in Saint-Remý, a small village near Arles. While he was there, he painted a number of versions of the theme Wheatfield with a Reaper:

http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=2935&collection=1282&lang=en

There are better reproductions of other versions of this picture online, but this is the version of the Reaper in the Van Gogh museum and I prefer it because of the almost painful intensity of the yellow-golden colour used. There is less of the obvious compositional order than in the painting above, but this has given way to depth, above all, the depth of the luminous, burning yellow of the ripe wheat and the storm threatening in the greenish hue of the sky around the relentless late-summer Provencal sun. The circular swoops of colour, used to depict the ripe grain, are familiar from other works around the same time, above all Starry Night (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh-starry_night_ballance1.jpg). Vincent’s own comment on the work is revealing, “In this reaper – a vague figure laboring like the devil in the terrible heat to finish his task – I saw an image of death, in the sense that the wheat being reaped represented mankind. […] But there is nothing sad in this death, it takes place in broad daylight, under a sun that bathes everything in a fine, golden light.”

In this painting perhaps, most of all, we sense a correlation between the painting and the inner life of the artist – thoughts maybe of death as the clean conclusion of burning light, consuming everything in a conflagration of inexpressible clarity and purity, the transformation of pain and confusion in a cataclysmic, cleansing ending.

Vincent’s inner torture grew and he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be nearer to his doctor and his beloved brother, Theo, both of whom lived in Paris. In the end, nothing helped to quiet his private conflict and he died two months later, as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Sometime in the three weeks before his death he painted Wheatfield with Crows one of a number of landscapes involving fields and brooding skies:

http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=3343&collection=1282&lang=en

There are also signals here of his inner conflict. Writing to Theo about the series, he said; “They depict vast, distended wheatfields under angry skies, and I deliberately tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness in them.” Are we justified in seeing the stormcrows rising as some kind of prophesy concerning the immediate future? I don’t know. What I do know is that I spent a considerable amount of time last week walking between all three pictures and renewing my admiration and awe for Vincent van Gogh. And, just perhaps, taking a tiny step in understanding him better. Not that the understanding is so important, mind you, viewing the pictures and being moved by their wonderful beauty and artistry is far more important anyway.