A Personal Experiment In Writing · 6:05pm Apr 17th, 2015
I went to see the Museum of Innocence today.
It's quite a name that, isn't it? The more literary minded among you may recognise it as the name of a novel by Turkish author and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. He built this place as he was writing the book - a history, a monument to the lives of two people who never existed and feel all the more real for it.
It was a sunny day, gorgeous, clear blue skies, but the inside of the museum was dark. The experience of walking through it was unlike anything I have ever had before, and it was undoubtedly the finest museum I have ever been to. But I don't think I should have gone the way I did. The museum did not touch me in the way I expected it too, and it was not until I left that I realised why.
My companion to this museum was full of life and laughter, and totally unsuited to the melancholy of Pamuk's objects of memory. She left to sit in the sun while I pored over dismantled watches and old photographs, and I envy her for that. Her mind is full of so much more light than mine, and normally while looking at it I cannot help but wonder how. She did not fit with that place. It is a place to go alone to anyway.
But more than that, today I left the museum to a cool sea breeze, blue skies and a slowly fading sun. I walked up the road, hot, tired and heavy, and sat with her at the small cafe she found, discussing Dostoyevsky. She left for a while to pay for her coffee, and I sat outside this little cafe and saw the city.
I saw the curve of the road as it went down to the sea, and the seagulls drifting overhead. I saw and smelt and heard the dust and the dirt and the shouts and chatter of life, cars and horns and conversations. I saw two boys (or were they men?) stop for a conversation, delivering water casks piled high precariously on their laps and the back of their little scooters, and I saw the angry woman in the car, whose furious horn sent them scattering like pigeons. I saw the rusted iron bars that banded the tall building to my right. And I saw the sunlight that filtered through the branches that peeked out above it. I saw the old man gently pushing prayer beads through finger and thumb outside the modern art gallery. I saw the hint of a smoking man outside a garage in an alley far off. The garage was filled with music and light, and he surveyed the street before returning, closing it off once more to the outside world. I saw a young business man who called me friend, asking where the metro was. I saw him again, wreathed in shame and secrecy, walking the other direction five minutes later.
I felt the sun on my face, smelled the earth and the grit.
I have rarely been so content in my entire life.
That is why, I think, that I did not love the Museum of Innocence as I should have. It is, after all, a museum: a monument to the past, to dead and dying things. It is a place to visit in the winter, when the chill seems to seep into the cracks of your soul and a melancholy covers the city.
But in the spring, Istanbul is alive. And Pamuk's memories seem pale and lifeless in the face of it.
I think I only truly felt something for the Museum when walking home later that day. It was the same route I have walked every day for three weeks, but today I saw something I had missed every time before. An old building, decrepit and abandoned, right on the main street, shrouded by a few trees. It was made entirely of wood, and the peeling name over the door indicated it was once an apartment block. All at once, I felt all the loss that the Museum had been trying to show me, and I almost felt like crying. Not five minutes later, I saw a tower that had been in the Museum, pictured in a postcard. And I could see, for just a moment, why he wanted to keep this old world.
As I walked back to the apartment I am staying in, the Bosphorus loomed to my right. I have never felt the joy that so many do at the seaside, despite my love of the sea, and the Bosphorus embodies why. The sea is not about sand and sun and swimming for me. The sea is dark and deep and foreboding - it is alien and powerful and cold. It is the realm of great ships, not little dinghies and windsurfers.
The Bosphorus is the ocean. It's not the seaside, there is nothing welcoming about its depths. It is as if you can step right from the middle of one of the most crowded cities in the world, straight into the heart of the ocean. I harbour a deep and fierce love for it, and I likely always will.
You can buy chestnuts in Taksim Square.
Vendors line the streets - you can't walk twenty feet without bumping into another one - and the glorious scent of roasting chestnuts wafts from each one. Chestnuts are something I have always associated with England, with home, in the winter. They bring to mind fireplaces and armchairs and warm blankets as snow falls outside. But there is precious little snow in England these days, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have had chestnuts there. Here, you can buy them for 5 lira per 100 grams, and they come in a little brown paper bag. I bought some on my way home from dinner one night. My new friends thought me silly, but that little paper bag made me incredibly happy.
Before I went home today, I walked with my friend to Taksim Square. It is the heart of the city, the bustling centre for tourists and locals alike. We said our goodbyes, and she headed home, but I stayed for a while. I went to the middle of the square - I had never been there before - and I stood there, looking around. I felt the sun and the breeze on my face, heard the sounds of the city again. I found a small patio, covered in cracked paving and surrounded by a broken stone railing, like some ancient, dilapidated balcony. Where the paving was gone or cracked, dust, glass, cigarette butts and mud were scattered around. I could feel them crunch under my shoes as I walked around. It seemed to me that this place had once had some grandeur, long lost, but it's remnants still lingered. Over the broken railings, a little park could be seen through the trees where women and girls alike played on the swings. Beside me, a sad looking man in a brown sweater watched the city as he smoked. I never spoke to him, and he never looked at me, but he felt like a kindred spirit somehow. Behind me, a boy on roller skates stopped to talk with his friends. He had the most beautiful breathy laugh.
I admire writers like Pamuk, although I don't think I could ever be like them. As a writer and a reader, I have always favoured the fantastical, and how it can grant glimpses into our own lives and what matters in them. Writing about the fantastical is easy, if you have the imagination for it. But writing about reality is far harder, and far braver. To write about the mundane is not only to risk boredom, but to try and capture something that I am far too afraid to try. There is something wondrous about being alive. Something utterly amazing about seeing, feeling, touching hearing smelling, simply being that I know I forget far too often. I remembered it, as I explored that small, cracked patio. It is nearly impossible to capture that, and I salute those that try, even if they fail. And those that succeed? They have done something truly remarkable. I hope that they know that.
As I stood there, a couple walked up to the patio, sitting on the steps leading up to it. The man was dressed in designer clothes, in sunglasses t-shirt and jeans, hair gelled to perfection. The woman, conversely, was dressed conservatively, wearing a hijab (a headscarf) along with her plain black dress. The man was holding the most perfect rose I have ever seen. He gave it to her, and a couple of petals blew away in the wind. I took a picture of them, and left.
I have only visited this city once before since my time here as a child. I think I understand, now, why despite that fact, I knew with an abiding certainty that this was my favourite city in the world. These are the moments Pamuk was trying to preserve, I think. Whether it worked or not - I think you need to visit for yourself to see.
I suspect that it may be a mistake to post this. I have not had the heart to re-read it, or to check for errors. More than that, it is something personal and emotional, and both my childhood and the internet have taught me that to expose yourself to the world is to invite only mockery and condemnation. Even were I to discount all that, I'm not sure it's even very good. It is absurdly pretentious. It is melancholic and moody and stunted - a bad imitation of something done by a thousand other people a thousand times before. It is a strange arrogance people have, that we think our problems and epiphanies are unique to us, are somehow special and better because we have them.
But we all have to make mistakes sometimes, don't we? So here is my mistake.
Make of it what you will.
To be honest, I don't feel that this post was a mistake. It truly touched me deeply, and it is giving me a longing to return to Japan, a place not where I am from, but of where I have fond memories from my short visit there a few years ago. I think it's wonderful that you have found a place that has touched you so deeply and has such a special place in your heart.
This was genuinely incredibly written. You sure do paint a vivid picture, and you seem to write from the heart. I could really feel what you felt. Perhaps a little bit of your influence comes from your immediate associations, but I do feel this was a magazine or periodical-worthy piece.
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Thank you. Really, thank you. And I'm glad that I could inspire something like that in you - if that is the only thing this piece does, it has still succeeded.
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Heh. You always know what to say, huh Rissie?
Thank you. Both of you. It really means a lot to me, here, in this place in time. Maybe in a few days, maybe in a week this will feel less raw for me, but I have never exposed myself in this way, and for the first comments to be so positive?
Thank you.
I'm not tearing up here. Lies, all of it.
Also you suck :(
No, but seriously. I think the only way to know a city is to really see it through the interpretation of a person walking the streets. Heck, I don't even write like this. My travelogs pale in comparison. so good work. Good work indeed.
Also don't call me Rissie.
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Love you too, Rissie.
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No U
Best !@#$ introspective travelogue I've read in a while. Keep it up and you will have a career writing about reality.
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Thank you so much (for this and the watch!). I've been really taken aback at how positive the response to this has been, in particular from writers who I have a great deal of respect for (such as yourself). I'd love to have a career in writing if possible, and the encouragement I've seen on this site has really inspired me to think that maybe I could. So thank you.
From Crutches:
Is that what you mean?
From chapter 2 of Ray Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine:
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I've just read through Crutches, and I find myself empathising with it on a fundamental level. I love science fiction. I love fantasy. But you're right - it is all too easy to use fantastic worlds and creatures, vast and unfathomable ideas about the human condition to hold up your writing, to make it seem more interesting than it actually is.
I will say that in the intervening years since I wrote this piece, I have come to believe that you can in fact write about the extraordinary in the mundane while writing in these genres. It's just a hell of a lot harder, because one must have the crutches right there, so easy to use, and actively refuse them. There's a reason, I think, why there is a lot of good sci-fi, and very little truly great sci-fi (in the more literary sense, that is).
Ray Bradbury wrote great sci-fi. And great novels. And that excerpt captured exactly what I was trying to talk about in that sentence you quoted.
Thanks for reading, and the follow - I hope I can make it worth your while.