Ultimately, perhaps, places are simply waiting for someone to look at them, to recognize them. Perhaps these places belong more to our existence than to modernity. They are perhaps waiting for new words or new figures.

—Luigi Ghirri, from Luigi Ghirri e l’Architettura

(Photo, mine, from a first trip to Istanbul)

The beast is hungry and the dream keeps on coming. Of the cities without ending, the flow state walks, the bridges, never before witnessed, receding into banks of fog. The metaphorical Bering Strait crossing. Possibility and possibility. Uninvented sweetnesses and discord, and all senses on. 

Sure, you can write a book in a pandemic, one that addresses the slippery thing inside of you, that wild and yearning spirit still hungry for the world. You can make peace with the beige country of your room, the color of trees. You can travel from the armchair’s vantage and come to terms with immense stillness, find some safe place within for every impulse to go, even as the internal Greek chorus presses you to leave. Towards meaning, towards more!

I’ve had this dream for the past twenty years. In it a plane is always leaving, and I’m sprinting through the airport, wild-haired and perspiring, staring into the faces of anonymous airline clerks, gesturing in a wild commotion, limbs flailing (suddenly I have five of them, all hurtling through space-time simultaneously). The words are metallic in my throat, Is there another flight going tonight? Is another flight going?

In the dream perhaps I’m in London, or Taipei, or San Francisco, there is no difference between the grey airport atmospheres of each dream, the mind colors my panic and none of the surrounding detail, colors the feeling of 500 carrier bags bobbing suddenly around me, as though suddenly I were underwater and surrounded by every possession I’ve ever owned, floating and sinking dead weight. 

There is a Russian word for ‘forget’ (запоминать) that sounds like the Polish word for ‘remember’ (zapomniec). In America, we say, ‘What you resist persists.’ The world is opening up again. And so the hungry beast says, what if? And where next?

Somewhere between the poles of thinking and feeling there is a place that I am always seeking, somewhere between soul and ego, analysis and surrender where finally I can rest. A place or a feeling? I don’t know what I’m looking for…I know I’ll have that feeling when I get it, I tell myself, as the Coltrane quote goes. Looking for something that hasn’t been played before.

I am going to go live in Istanbul for a bit — a place that feels a bit to my brain like free jazz in urban form, the highest compliment I can give a city. It turns all my senses on, a place of sensuality and structure, serendipity and madness, like London or New York, yet one that for now remains a mystery.