The other day a friend of mine who has also been traveling for a while said something that struck me while we were taking a walk. He’d just come back to Istanbul after spending a month in western Anatolia and Georgia. He thought that a lot had changed since he’d left. One of the shops near his old apartment had closed and he’d noticed the streets seemed much quieter than they were in October. As we were talking we turned off the alley we were on and onto one of the city’s main boulevards. “Nevermind,” he said.”It’s amazing to think that every place you leave just continues going on and existing after you leave.”
This was far from a revelation, and he knew it. Of course places remain after you’re gone, and they don’t remain as static entities. They continue breathing, all their dynamic parts jiving and pitching in unconscious concert. It’s easy to project how the individual parts will continue moving. The fishermen will continue to crowd every pier. Kids in Fatih will keep charging tourists with toy guns and chants of “Hello! Hello! Money?” And every young person in the city will still go to drink and dance at Peyote*. Winter will come. People will abandon the streetside cafes which are so crowded right now. The tourist neighborhoods will slow down, and without seasonal jobs, people will return their hometowns until next spring.
New neighborhoods will be developed, rough parts of town will get gentrified. Develop, grow, change; cities are not statues. We know this. They burn and consume all the kinetic energy from millions of moving parts. Every Student, street vendor, and old man playing backgammon in teashops, covered floor to ceiling in white tile. The people only passing through carry their own energy, and tourist areas try to catch as much of that energy as they can, drafting off the whiffs and snaring it in the form of dollars spent on hotels, carpets, and kebap.
Of course the city keeps on moving, all cities and places keep on moving, but what my friend was trying to say is, we forget this. When we look away they seem to stop and stand still, but that’s not really the case. Just think about them again and all that energy and motion is conjured right back up. Since May there are so many more of these towns, cities, and landscapes in my head. Thinking of them all at once is an impossible feat of course, and when I try, it makes me shudder. The world is built on a much bigger scale than I will ever comprehend. But when I try now the picture I conjure is so much bigger than it ever was before, and even though I know how far away I am from my goal, it makes me feel better that in a non-infinite period of time, I am able to get that much closer.**
*Every new friend I’ve met in this city, and there have been many of them – Turks are very friendly to foreigners, has suggested that we go to this bar. Sure… it’s a cool bar, but in a city of 18 million people and in a district of hundreds of bars, I find it hard to believe, everyone goes to peyote.
** Right now I am watching an old man help two little girls play jump rope. Directly across the street, a family of cats are sleeping on the tin roof of the grocery store below. Istanbul’s tamed stray dogs keep passing by the grocer’s looking for scraps in the garbage, and people, dozens by minute, pass, in twos and threes under the balcony I write from. I am going to miss this city.
Ah, you are making me miss it so much! I will be back, I’m sure, but I wonder how much will have changed. In the time I was there, two new stores opened up around my apartment and a new apartment building was being built. Things change fast.
As for Peyote, it’s one of those places you want to show people if they have a limited time in the city. Like Seattle has the Cha Cha, where I always bring people even though I don’t go there very often otherwise.
It’s been 2 and a half months, and it still comes up every friday night.