In Which We Suffer Through A Rare Constellation Of Events

Your Letter Which I Read With Greatest Concern

The light cast by substantive references, illusions and details.

Gershom Scholem had fled Germany when things started to get complicated. He begged his friend Walter Benjamin to join him in Palestine where, he argued, they would be safe from whatever was going to happen. Benjamin constantly demurred - instead he fled to Paris, while making arrangements for his vast library to be cared for in his absence. Soon, his brother Georg had been imprisoned at a concentration camp at Sonnenburg. (He later died at the last concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies at Mauthausen.) Scholem's advice to Benjamin therefore seems prescient even at the time it is being delivered. But Walter Benjamin had other things on his mind.

The following abridged letters to Scholem relate his growing desperation at this perilous time.

Gerhard,

I'm using a quiet hour of deep depression to send you a page once again. The immediate occasion is receipt of your utterly remarkable article, which I received only this morning from Kitty Marx from Koenigsberg, along with your letter of introduction and the announcement of your arrival. The rest of the day was taken up with work and the dictation of a radio play, which I must now send in, in accordance with a contract the better part of which has long been fulfilled and which facilitated my flight to the Balers.

The little composure that people in my circles were able to muster in the face of the new regime was rapidly spent, and one realizes that the air is hardly fit to breathe anymore - a condition which of course loses significance as one is being strangled anyway…

Publication of my work has now been suspended for more than a fortnight.

Prospects of seeing the work published as a book are minimal. Everyone realizes that it is so superb that it will be called to immortality, even in manuscript form. Books are being printed that are more urgently in need of it.

Walter

Gerhard,

My constitution is frail. The absolute impossibility of having anything at all to draw on threatens a person’s inner equilibrium in the long run, even one as unassuming and as used to living in precarious circumstances as I am.

Since you wouldn’t necessarily notice this if you were to see me, its most proper place is perhaps in a letter. The intolerability of my situation has less to do with my passport difficulties than with my total lack of funds. At times I think I would be better off if I were less isolated.

The odd letter now and then gives me hope that acquaintances might put in an appearance, although experience of course teaches me not to put great faith in their plans.

Walter

Gerhard,

Regarding my condition, I am once more again lying sick in bed, suffering from a very painful inflammation in the leg. Doctors, or even, medicine, are nowhere to be found here, since I am living totally in the country, thirty minutes away from the village of San Antonio. Under such primitive conditions, the facts that you can hardly stand on your feet, hardly speak the native tongue, and in addition even have to work, tend to bring you up against the margins of what is bearable. As soon as I have regained my health, I will return to Paris.

It hardly needs to be stated that I am facing my stay in Paris with the utmost reserve. The Parisians are saying: “Les emigres song pies que les boches” (“The émigrés are worse than the Krauts”) and that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there. I shall try to thwart its interest in me the same way I have done in the past.

Please write me if you have read Wiesengrund’s Kierkegaard in the meantime.

Walter

Dear Gerhard,

Even if these wishes arrive far too late for Rosh Hashanah, they will at least reach you in time for the long-sought and now official establishment of your academic duties, not to mention the title of Professor.

Before I touch on this or anything else from our last exchange, let me just sketch out my situation. I arrived in Paris seriously ill. By this I mean that I had not recovered at all while on Ibiza, and the day I was finally able to leave coincided with the first in a series of very severe attacks of fever. I made the journey under unimaginable conditions, and immediately after my arrival here, malaria was diagnosed. Since then, a rigorous course of quinine has cleared my head.

Friends have transported the major part of my archives to Paris, at least the manuscript section. The Heinle papers are the only manuscript material of any importance still missing. The problem of securing my library is mainly a question of money, and that by itself presents a formidable enough task. Add to this that I have rented my Berlin apartment out furnished and cannot simply remove the library, which is an essential part of the inventory. On the other hand, the person renting it only pays what the landlord demands.

Whether or not I will be able to move into the quarters Frau von Goldschmidt-Rothschild promised me has become rather problematic because of a series of oversights and delays far too complex to recount here. It is also gradually becoming clear that the apartment is by no means free of charge.

Walter

Dear Gerhard,

The 15th of December is drawing near, and after this date the grapes of the press will be hanging even farther out of reach for an old fox like me, and what little fruit still beckons from over the shard-strewn walls of the Third Reich has to be snatched away with the nimblest of bites indeed. I had to select this shabby stationery in order to keep the narrow temporal frame set for my letter in front of me in spatial terms. And I could say a great deal more. If I could present things to you as they truly are, I would most certainly not need to ask you to pardon my longish silence: you would understand.

But, as matters stand, I can only allude to things and say that someone who was a close acquaintance of both Brecht and myself in Berlin has fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. He was freed after someone from the same circle of friends intervened, and he subsequently turned up here and filled us in about the dangers threatening the few who are still close to us.

All this is complicated in the most fateful way by the fact that we may one day have to face the possibility that the denunciations originated from a man in Paris we all know.

Walter

Dear Gerhard,

Even though you haven’t written for quite some time, I want to return the cordial wishes you so regularly send me for Rosh Hashanah on the threshold of the European New Year. But you will have to take into account my profound weariness with the moment. For some time now, these moments have turned into days and the days into weeks. It’s not surprising that the pressure to put three new irons in the fire daily should lead to severe fatigue. I am not achieving much in my dejected state because I am convinced that I cannot ask very much more of myself.

The top priority among the little I am still capable of would probably be a change of scenery. Paris is much too expensive, and the contrast with my previous stay here is much too harsh. I see nothing encouraging when I survey my surroundings, and the only person I find of interest finds me less so.

Otherwise the town seems dead to me now that Brecht is gone.

He would like me to follow him to Denmark. Life is supposed to be cheap there. But I am horrified by the winter, the travel costs, and the idea of being dependent on him and him alone. Nevertheless the next decision I can bring myself to make will take me there. Life among the emigres is unbearable, life alone is no more bearable, and a life among the French cannot be brought about.

Walter

Dear Gerhard,

I am writing to you with unaccustomed promptness and in a unaccustomed form. I do not want to fail to make use of the rare constellation of events that puts a typewriter at my disposal, the more so since your letter of the 19th of this month as already preoccupied me.

Intensely and sorrowfully. Is our understanding really threatened? Has it become impossible for such an expert on my development as you are, an expert on almost all the forces and conditions influencing this development, to keep up to date? Do you and I stand in danger of your interest one day taking on the color of pity?

A correspondence such as we maintain is, as you know, something very precise, but also something calling for circumspection. This circumspection by no means precludes touching on difficult questions. But these can only be treated as very private ones. To the extent that this has happened, the letters in question have definitely been filed - you can be sure of that - in my “inner registry.”

Walter

"Thornfelt Swamp" - Gareth Coker ft. Tom Boyd (mp3)

"The Spirit Tree" - Gareth Coker ft. Aeralie Brighton (mp3)

In Which We Are Going To Love Living In Paris

Hard People

The poet Charles Henri Ford was gay, he had a boyfriend, and he was open to other things. Say, for example, he saw a man passing by on the street. He might think of him later, assuming he had a particular flair or gravitas. Years later the individual might appear in one of Ford's poems, for the only thing he enjoyed more than sex was immersing himself in his art. 

In his diaries, Ford proves himself the best American journaler of his century. He makes Kafka's cogent observational entries seem clunky and unaware of themselves in contrast, because he takes so much of what the world is in without flinching. In his primary relationship with the painter Pavlik Tchelitchew and the other affairs he consummated in full view of his partner, Henri Ford brings the sex life of his period into full and magnificent display in all its decadence, glory and shame.

The entries that follow are highly excerpted from the original manuscript, which you can purchase here.

The masculine type of simple boy who goes with girls and yet has something passive about him. The incredible looking gymnast who appeared in the weightroom yesterday at the Y: face of a soap-sculpture athlete (baby face), expressionless corn-blond hair contrasting with double-thick black eyelashes which gave the final artificial touch - what can you do with a big doll like that? Why, it's too heavy to pick up.

+

We were sitting in the front row, someone pinched my ear from the back, I turned around and it was Carl Van Vechten. Carl is editing some works of Gertrude Stein, I sent him recently this quotation from Jung: "...only when we have found the sense in apparent nonsense, can we separate the valueless from the valuable."

Gertrude Stein told me, in 1933, after she learned of my liaison with Pavlik: "Americans are strong but Russians are stronger. You'll come out the little end." And when she couldn't "break it up" she stopped seeing me.

+

Pavlik, as he went to bed last night, "I don't love anybody." "Not even me?" "Not even myself." His work is at the point where he can't go back and cannot see his way forward.

Yesterday afternoon we went to New Haven to see the Sartre play. Jed Harris' "restrained" direction is more strained than directed. The casting is abominable — Boyer no more than a voice. The play has been disastrously cut and mauled — it's cheap with a cheapness even Edward, My Son doesn't touch. If this is the theater, take me away from it.

Bert told me of the women he'd had in Milwaukee, Philadelphia - and in Newfoundland, where they wanted to go out and fuck in the snow... "And when you jerk off do you try to make it last a long time?" Bert: "No, I like to get it over with as soon as possible." He told me of how they used to extract the alcohol from shellac, on board ship, by straining it through a loaf of white bread. And he said, "It's been so long since I've had a woman that it's pathetic."

The human, being there - one is moved, that's all.

+

Where does sleep go when we get enough?

We float on a cloud of sleep through a landscape of dream.

Is sleep, like the sun, always there even when we don't see it?

And if I married a girl, I'd want to sleep with her — both of us naked, in a double bed, the light would go out and we'd begin to fuck. Sex would be no problem. The problem would be: would she bore me the next day?

On arrival in Weston Friday before tea, Bert jumped into his Levis, looking more sexy than ever, and we three took a walk. Vorisoff, our neighbor, came to dinner. Shortly after dinner Bert and I went upstairs, he wanted to look at the pornographic playcards and since there was nothing else to do he suggested we go to bed so I went back downstairs and said goodnight to Vorisoff and Pavlik. Bert was going to spend the night in my bed. "Fuck me between the legs," he said — and hollered when I hit the piles which seem to be practically out — because the next afternoon even my tongue hurt them (I had taken him in his bathrobe downstairs and washed his ass for him.) So after we had both come (I sucked him after shooting between his legs — I can see him now in bed lifting one leg to wipe the come off his crotch with the towel I tossed him), he said he was hungry so we had scrambled eggs, then he said he felt "jumpy," that he wanted to take a walk and wanted me to get dressed and go with him. We had had Scotch after we got back. I shall make a list of "What's beautiful about Bert." Not now — it's too long.

+

Last evening before bedtime Pavlik had another of his crises, in which he unloaded his feelings about our relationship. The most terrible thing he said was that he had the feeling I was waiting for him to die and that when he did die I wouldn't shed a tear: "Americans are the hardest people in the world..."

He said that when I was away from the apartment, then he "bloomed," that there were other people who "calmed" him when he was nervous, but that I drained him — "I feel your pulling, pulling all the time, that's why you look so young, you age me, if you were to stay away from me one year you wouldn't look like you do now, like your portrait, just look in the mirror after one year, you'll see!"

I told him, "If we are only staying together out of convenience and cowardice, then it's pathetic, a break should be made..."

+

The voice of Leonor over phone - soft, and low pitched, very seductive.

I like the idea of liking girls and going to bed with them but I'm afraid I'm much too conditioned by boy-loving. On the boat, in the group Tanny-Bobby-Betty (latter a dark skinned ballerina traveling with Tanny), it was always Bobby who set off the sparks and whom I liked to look at, touch, listen to — I'm made that way, that's all.

+

Concentration is like an animal or rare plant that must be hunted — I'm on the road. "My shitting is of a completely different kind now," Pavlik announces, on the road to recovery.

Up at six and found a feather in my bed, as though, while I was sleeping, I'd been a bird.

+

There was a tremendous circle around the moon last night ("like the asshole of the universe," I told Pavlik.) Even the sun can embrace but half the world at once.

+

In the marketplace: a little girl's pushing a littler girl's screaming face in the placid face of a munching sheep. A trembling white duck being weighted in hand-scales: part of the trembling world, part of me.

Mountains change, even the bare rock ones with their melting leaves of snow.

Pavlik is absolutely as wild as a domestic cat — always ready to be petted or frightened.

A gypsy woman asked me for 10 lire for bread for a child then proposed to read my hand and I let her - she said I had an amico who wished me well from his heart but that an end would soon come to our friendship.

+

Dear Jung is so sensible about sex: "A direct unconstrained expression of sexuality is a natural occurrence and as such neither unbeautiful nor repulsive. The 'moral' repression makes sexuality on one side dirty and hypocritical, on the other shameless and obtrusive.

Gino is here. He is unbelievably sweet and pure. We took a nap together after lunch and he was very affectionate and caressing but — "If you were a girl..."

He kissed me goodnight but wouldn't let me sleep with him.

+

Gino's asked me never to say again that I'd like to sleep with him. I'd kissed him on the lips and he'd responded with the information that men never kiss men on the lips.

Pavlik came and sat on my bed and asked me if I were "fallen in love." I said, "No how can I fall in love with someone who refuses to go to bed with me?" and Pavlik said, "That's exactly when one falls in love!"

+

Gino tells me: You're different today than on other days. I tell him: I change like the lake, not only every day but every hour. He asks, Why? I say: I'm water.

The three C's of (novel or) dramatic writing:

Create Character Continuously

+

He's leaving this morning on the 10:20 bus.

He says he came here like a baby and that I took his hand and told him how to eat.

Gino has gone... gave me a goodbye kiss - on the mouth. "Very clever of him not to go to bed with you," says Pavlik.

+

Dream: I fled, but with not enough speed (I felt) to put a safe distance between myself and three black horses wildly dashing in my direction. "There are two people in you," Pavlik told me, "and the bad one is very strong."

+

"La fatalite" is not, as Antonin Artaud implies, "the materialization of an intellectual force" - but the result of millions of things which happened independently of each other but whose combinations and conjunctions cause what seem to be single occurrences. One thing at a time is never one thing.

It's the desire to go to new extremes: either down (like Sade) or up (like Rilke). Baudelaire embraced both extremes: crime and the sublime.

A big egg-truck came down the hill with a sex-beast of a truck driver at the wheel who smiled at me, saying, "Kind of slippery, ain't it?" I smiled back and then knew he'd set the mechanism going which would end in my jerking off.

Why not have children instead of continuing in pursuit of the deformed image?

+

To get back to poetry: it's leaving the world in order to find it. To write: grasp the magic wand (phallic symbol) and trace your words with it — after the trance is induced.

When Hart Crane perceived that he had exhausted the exhilaration derived from drink and sex and poetry, he drowned himself. He had lost contact with the thread that leads up, Poetry, and took hold of the Whirlpool and didn't let go.

The moon was shining. The valley was full of mist. "Nice night for a murder," said Bert.

Coral (my ten year old niece ) tonight. "You ought to get married." I reply, "Why should I get married when I'm happy the way I am?" She said, "That's just what I'm afraid of. You're happy and may never get married!"

+

No travel to beautiful places, no children, no lovers — none of these can give me "consolation" — only my work — poetry — can give me the pride in existence that seems so important.

And so I wrote a prose poem. That feeling of being lost in creation — a forgetting of self — is one I haven't felt in a long time.

+

The annoying, symmetrical flies.

What a lot of fun we'd miss if we were born wise. We wouldn't run the risks.

Well, there are dreams we do not remember; but they exist, nevertheless.

+

Are not the winter trees nude? They are not skeletons — but "undressed", says Pavlik.

The image I want to catch is harder to capture than a butterfly with bare hands.

I mean, "it's the end of a year" becomes meaningless to me if I imagine it's being said by everyone in the world.

To be what you are - infinitely.

 

I took a terrace walk and saw the most brilliant falling star — I always make the same wish: Love.

+

Why is everyone always foolish enough to think that a sexual partner will make life happy?

I went ahead and became a homosexual — no matter what. Not everybody does that — who should (or would like to). All the fucked up lives — just because they weren't fucked.

A virtue of necessity? More usually a vice is made of it.

+

One of the most attractive "sections" of the bodies of young people: from the bottom row of ribs to the pubic hair. (Pav would include the pubic hair.) It's so flat, and intact, so undisintegrated, unmarked with sags or superfluous fat. It's beautiful. I think of that section of Rocco, of Benito, of Vito.

+

The shapes of the head of the soul. When bell-mouthed, what is the significance?

+

I enjoy life when, as Virginia Woolf puts it, "Quiet brings cool clear quick mornings, in which I dispose of a good deal of work and toss my brain into the air when I take a walk." But Djuna and I didn't thrill to Woolf's Orlando. Did I not read some of it aloud to her, that winter on the rue St.-Romain, in that lovely apartment, the heart- shaped big mirrors framed in gold, the studio bed, piled high with pillows covered in a variety of "ecclesiastical" cloths, some gold-embroidered? Her big bed, in the bedroom, had lots of little lacey pillows on top of it in the daytime. She'd go once a week to get her hair curled and tinted, strawberry blonde.

I was infatuated by her (rather than with her). And she was attracted by me — all the way to Tangier — but there I lost my charm for her because of my — selfishness — I didn't give her enough (my re-typing Nightwood was hardly enough, and a drunken lay now and then). I spent mornings at the beach, leaving her alone in the little Casbah house. And when she ceased being charmed, she quickly lost her charm for me. I didn't like the kind of mirror she became.

"This ravaging sense of the shortness..." (V.W.) I don't have that. I sense, rather, that life will be long — too long.

+

Gino would have spent the night in my double bed but I decided not to let him — he said he could feel friendship for a man — even imagine sacrificing his life for that friendship — but it's the woman whom he feels made to make love to... if he makes it at all.

He's a pleasant friend, nice to have around, handsome to look at, true-hearted, and I'm glad he came on this visit, though he is less a poet now and admits it.

Pavlik: "He just thinks you're a selfish American bitch — he's not very far from the truth — if you think you're something else you're mistaken."

+

I could write a comedy (but would I want to) with three main characters as follows:

A young writer.
An older painter.
The young writer's mother.

The "plot" — as made by the characters — would be the mother's attempt to get her son away from the older man — and her failure.

The setting: a New York penthouse.

One of subsidiary characters: a balletomane (based on Lincoln Kirstein's personality), who is a close friend of the painter's, and would also like to see the "household" broken up.

+

I met Isak Dinesen. She was wearing a deep cloche of tobacco-colored straw. She talks rhythmically, and sounds as if she were reading one of her own stories. She said I am like what she expected me to be. I said, "You are beyond my expectations." She wore a fur jacket with longish shiny fur.

+

Thornton Wilder just phoned, asked me to come into Rome and lunch with him tomorrow... It's five to four, I'll put the water on for tea. Will no one call on me today? I'll peep through the peephole before opening door. The new breadboy is cross-eyed, curious as a cat.

I've told Pavlik that he should "paint flat." (Upstart to Master.) Anyway, he told me some days later (a couple of days ago): "I would like to paint flat." I nodded my head: "Then that would be being painting instad of painting something."

"You want to know the truth?" (I to Pavlik.)

"What?"

"Matisse couldn't draw."

"That's what Gertrude Stein said."

"As for Braque — he drew worse than Matisse."

"I know that."

+

We are taking off at this moment from La Guardia. It will be a nonstop flight to New Orleans, Washington fogged out so no landing there possible. The plane, therefore, is not full, and there is a free seat between me and the Spanish-speaking woman on my right. On that seat, in a woven basket from Mexico, is the box which contains the sealed jar of Mother's ashes.

In New York I saw Djuna and took her a little bottle of perfume (Lancome). Djuna told me over phone that she couldn't receive me for tea chez elle but perhaps they'd give us "a bun" at Luigi's. She wasn't at Luigi's when I arrived but it wasn't long before I saw an old and stooped woman walking with a stick pass by the window and I opened the door for her.

Djuna's old-time snappishness wasn't there, though she tried to bare a false tooth now and then... She did say, when she first saw me, "You've grown hardly any older - it's disgusting!" She said various London literary lights had raved over her new play (Eliot, Muir, Read) and she's mailing the revised version to Eliot on Monday.

We may value old friends, but we can't go back to them.

+

To know when to leave alone those chance happenings.

+

If I'm going to love living in Paris I'll have to get used to — even like — that pearl-gray sky which ones sees on opening the curtains in the morning.

I told him, Perhaps it's only physical, maybe I don't love you at all. He said, I think you love me.

1948-1957

Paintings by Amy Shackleton.

"Slow Breathing Circuit" - Inventions (mp3)

In Which Faith Is Ours To Keep Lit

To Swim Across The World

by ARIANA ROBERTS

1

It’s Jeanne d’Arc day. Outside there is singing and marching; people flank the Rue di Rivoli bearing crosses, flowers, and a banner that says, “France is Christian and will always stay that way.”

The girl next to us is alone, has a French-Russian dictionary and looks tiny in the big pink velvet seat. You can tell she’s been crying. “I wish I could help her,” Sara says. When the waiter comes, she asks for chocolat au chaud in the smallest voice possible. There is a tan line on her finger where a ring used to be. I look at my own hand – a year later, that line is still there, like a scar. “I wonder what her story is,” Sara says. I know, but I can’t explain it to my friend.

I cover my hand with a napkin and order a Serendipity. “Good choice. I can tell you make good choices,” Colin says. A few minutes later, he hands me a drink that is not at all what I ordered. It looks innocent in the glass, but feels like a punch in the face. I’m in love.

“Let’s call this Petit Cendrillon,” he says. “Cinderella left the prince, and she lived happily ever after.”

He tells me how, centuries ago, French women in deep mourning were required to shun all public promenades. There was one street, leading away from the farther extremity of the Champs-Élysées to the Seine, where life went on for widows of the capital. Called “Allée des Veuves,” the avenue became a haven for the husbandless; there, they could drive carriages without reprisal and forget their sorrows without violating the code of Parisian society. Walking down Avenue Montaigne today, I can almost see them in the Jardin Mabille, admiring Chinese lanterns on boughs, lapping up spray from the fountains, practicing quadrilles amidst lilacs in full blossom.

Now the only lilacs are the silk ones in the windows of Dior. Inside, a little ring says “Oui” in gold script with a diamond dotting the “I.” “Toutes les filles en rêvent,” the salesgirl says.

“Non would be more fitting, for me at least. Qui trop embrasse, manqué le train.”

She laughs, picks the ring up, and slides it on my left ring finger, over a glaringly bright stripe of pale skin, brighter than the ring that covered it in the first place. It happens to fit perfectly.

2

According to Hindu theology, there are five sacred lakes collectively called Panch-Sarovar. One of those lakes, Pushkar, is where I heard this story.

Shakuntala is abandoned at birth, rescued by the sage Kanva, and raised in a hermitage. One day, the elders go on a pilgrimage, leaving her alone in the forest. The king is out hunting when he stumbles upon Shakuntala, falls in love, and marries her. He invites her to the capital, but she wants to say goodbye to Kanva first. Before leaving, he gives her a signet ring as proof of their union.

Shakuntala waits for Kanva, fantasizing about her future life as queen. She’s so busy dreaming she doesn’t realize a sage has come to the hermitage. Offended, he bewitches the king into forgetting her existence.

Eventually the elders take Shakuntala to the palace. While crossing a river en route, she carelessly loses the ring. When they reach the palace, the king doesn’t recognize Shakuntala. The elders think she is a crazy liar; feeling betrayed, they abandon her. Alone in the desert, Shakuntala nearly dies giving birth to the king’s child.

Later, a fisherman finds the ring in the belly of a fish. Upon seeing it, the king remembers his wife. He sets out to find her and encounters an army of Asuras. After defeating them, he is taken to Hindu heaven. It is years before he returns to Earth, where he meets Shakuntala and their child by chance. But Shakuntala is no longer the sheltered girl from the hermitage — she’s a legit female Ibn Battuta. Raising a child and traveling the world has made her wise and strong.

Since she won’t go back to the palace, the king asks to accompany the little family on their journey. Though she never stopped loving him, Shakuntala refuses. “Where I am going, no man can follow,” she explains sadly. When people ask how I lost my wedding ring, this is the story I tell instead.

Pushkar Lake is surrounded by ghats, a series of steps leading to the water. Thousands flock there every year, believing a dip in the lake will cleanse them of sin. It will not. I was there a month and swam every day. Every day, I came out feeling just as bad as when I went in.


3

Nearly opposite the island of Samos, Ephesus lay among the slopes of Mount Pion and Mount Koressos, on the Aegean Turkish Coast. The port was strategically located near the mouth of the Cayster, along the main trade route from Rome to the Orient. If you start a tour from the upper entrance, you are immediately rewarded with a magnificent view of the Street of the Curetes down to the Library of Celsus.

The theater where the Ephesians rioted at the instigation of Demetrius is situated within a hollow of Mt. Pion. It was decorated with pillars, niches, and fine statuary. The marble seats for the spectators were arranged in a half circle of 66 rows; these, it has been estimated, afforded room for about 25,000 persons. The acoustic properties of the theater were excellent. Even today, a word spoken in a low voice at the location of the stage can be heard throughout the theater. I know, because once Paul said, “Stay here,” and ran down to the stage. From the top seats I could hear him say, “I love Ari.”

Fragments of the temple of Artemis indicate that brilliant color and sculpture adorned the building. Large white marble tiles covered its roof. Instead of mortar, gold is reputed to have been used between the joints of marble blocks. Never had such large blocks of marble been used to create this kind of building at this magnitude. Though Heracleitus decried the temple’s dark approach to the altar, for the rest of the ancient world, it seemed as if it would never fall into decline. 

In the 3rd century C.E., an earthquake effectively rent the great temple in half. Almost immediately, seafaring Goths from the Black Sea pounced, plundering the temple riches before setting it on fire. Eventually, silting sealed off the harbor, and Ephesus ceased to function as a port. No modern settlement stands on the same site today.

“One of the greatest human achievements in the world, and it barely lasted a century,” Paul said.

“I wonder why they didn’t try to rebuild it.”

“Probably embarrassed. They all put their faith in something they shouldn’t have. Nothing humans can create is lasting.” It was dusk, and we’d come without a tour group, surrounded only by columns that line the street from the theater to the city harbor. He took my hand and led me to the bottom of the street, through the arch that was the gateway to the world.

4

Follow the Theodesian Walls past Topkapi-Ulubatli and you’ll reach Sulukule, the Harlem of Istanbul. We’d gotten off at the wrong metro stop and found it accidentally, a once-vibrant center of Romani culture turned Dudley Street. The entire area was leveled by demolition crews, save a few colorful buildings — relics of the Byzantine era — in shambles. Assuming the area abandoned, we fell asleep in a purple house, the casualty of an urban redevelopment project long forgotten. When Paul woke me up in the morning, there were little kids standing over us, poking him. “People live here,” he said incredulously.

We played hide-and-seek in the ruins a few hours; then, one boy led us up to a mosque overlooking Sulukule. He spoke, and Paul translated.

“Mimar Sinan built it for Princess Mihrimah. She was in love with Sinan, but forced to marry a grand vizier. Mihrimah stayed in an unhappy marriage more than twenty years, until her husband died. Then Sinan built the mosque, to prove he still loved her. Nothing else like it would exist for centuries. It has hundreds of windows, but only one minaret. Mihrimah ordered Sinan to stop, even though she was entitled to two.”

“Why?”

“The mosque is a symbol. Of her loneliness.”

“I don’t understand. She was free, and Sinan loved her. What was the problem?"

“Mihrimah was 17 when she got married. Before that, she lived with her parents. She never had the chance to live her own life.”

“So instead of sharing her life with someone who loved her…”

“She died alone. Because that was her choice.”

“I don’t think I like this story,” I said. “It makes no sense.”

A few years later, I went back to the rubble. Sirens blared throughout Istanbul to call people to prayer. When the chanting stopped, there was a sound like rushing water coming from a small pit nearby. “Cisterns,” an old woman said. “From Constantinople.”

“Underneath us?"

“Hundreds of them.”

I stood at the edge of the dirt, gauging the cavity’s size. I could fit down there.

“You’ll ruin your dress,” she warned.

The mosque, situated on the highest hill in Istanbul, cast its shadow over us, an emblem of Sulukule’s former radiance and present decay. I thought of the wedding that was supposed to take place there. What I didn’t understand before made perfect sense now.

I smoothed some wrinkles out of my white gown and slid down the dirt hole. “Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I’m not going to need this anyway.”

 
5

“Where will you go?” Paul asked.

“I don’t know. People have been asking me that all year. I never know.”

“How did you pick where you went before?”

“I sit in the airport, looking at departures. If there’s a place I’ve never heard of before, I go. If there’s a place someone told me to avoid, I go there, too.”

It was March, the first time we’d spent together since breaking up. I was too tired to drive; he was sleeping in the backseat, so I pulled over and stretched out on the roof of the car, looking up at the stars over Lake Baikal. When he got out and sat next to me, there was more light in the sky than night.

“Have you ever seen so many stars?”

“No.”

“Not even in Thimphu?”

“The clouds made them hard to see,” I said.

“You know what’s funny? You’re seeing these stars for the first time, but they’re not even there anymore. They ran out of fuel and died ages ago.” Paul turned his back to me and laid on the car, propping his head up on one elbow. “We drove all the way here to stare at a ghost.”

 
When a star dies, eventually, if the supernova is large enough, it triggers the formation of new stars, but not all the time. Sometimes, pressure from outside forces causes the remnants to collapse into a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light.

A week later, we left Russia, parting ways. Paul went to Zurich, and I went to Rason, a little seaside village in the DPRK.

7

Everything I write about my experiences represents a loss. I can tell you about the Kremlin diamond vaults and being tasered by a KGB agent and camping in a puffin colony and dinner with Leila Bekhti and partying with Stella McCartney and ziplining over Shan foothills and playing tag in a minefield and bragging about my pain tolerance to a man at the airport — perhaps you’ve heard of him — John McCain. I can tell you about eating an apple off the tree in Almaty — the riotous, visceral colors and scent of the orchard; the juice that dripped everywhere no matter how neat my bites were — but you're never going to get it unless you go there yourself.

There's a disconnect. You have to walk the beaches of Goa barefoot, then climb the steps of Sacré-Coeur in 5-inch heels to know how conflicted I am, to see how I love two worlds and waffle between them. I can describe Paul on paper, that's easy. But you can't understand how I felt when he ran after me at The Standard and kissed me outside my room and spent almost a decade with me — at our age, an eternity — who I left and lost and spent the last year trying to forget. All I can say is this: He's the reason I flit from hotel to hotel, living everywhere and nowhere, and right before I put my key in the door I always look down the hall, hoping he'll come running around the corner. He never does.

Ariana Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Cleveland. She last wrote in these pages about the brightest star of the north. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"The Swan" - Camille Saint-Saëns (mp3)

"The Cuckoo In The Heart of the Woods" - Camille Saint-Saëns (mp3)