Dogs Skipping Abysses: Reminders, Ghazal

Salaam loved ones,

In fact, I wrote a whole first post the night before last, focused, emptied my self, went out ready to send it this morning (when I was to get my internet set-up, finally)...but (of course?) I lost it, didn't save it correctly...so here I am, oh, so frustrated. It's not important enough to really complain about; just annoying enough to hijack a good part of my daily imagination. You know how I get. But so to put aside the obvious...it's too impossible trying to recreate that serious unleashing of impressions, emotions, brilliant apercus without feeling in bad faith. I'm all conscious. Now I have to face what I wanted to tell you. This'll be different, then...sabr, walid, sabr (patience, boy, patience).

Was that putting aside the obvious?

It's Wednesday, right? So it's my fourth day. I'm eating lunch right now on the roof of the school, which is an old upper class Jewish mansion, the second tallest building in Rabat. You can see various clandestine looking meetings going on lower rooftops (which roofs overlap one another; which roofs you can follow West with your eye until, suddenly, you're looking into the Atlantic); and you can see the children of those (men) meeting watching those meetings going on, dogs skipping abysses between rooftops.

You should see everyone inside, in the cafeteria, on their laptops. We all just got connected. I'm out here in the sun, alone, squinting as I try to write, balancing a plate in my lap, risking my laptop, because--no, not to be superior or any such nonsense, I really would just rather be out here, alone, easier to think (paradoxically maybe) in an oppressive sun than a cool accommodating cafeteria. That's fair, right?

Moroccan food, pretty much piles of spiced vegetables and cous-cous, is good.

NB: Not that you need my permission, but you can skim a whole lot of what follows. For better or for worse, admittedly anomalistically, here, filtering seems criminal, if not impossible. And I mean, this first post coming belatedly and whatnot--you're getting more than you normally will at once.

It is hard getting to your computer. It feels too much like a retreat. Not just to Home, but to some individual guaranteed privacy, which I'm not so sure I want. And especially me: you know me. I feel like I ought to try to stay away from the thing. But then: a) I am, in fact, in school and b) it keeps me from you. Thus, there has to be a compromise somewhere. It (retreat) gets even harder, though, because this experience of traveling sort of takes you whole and takes you forward, swallows you up to the neck, and I'm not sure if the momentum's mine...but then, who else could it be coming from? Anyway, it might be freeing...in that weird way that being less strictly free makes you see straight.

Yo se. Bastante poesia. One benefit of doing this over is that now I have a (general, mostly "free") form for the spontaneous content I generated two nights ago. I don't think I'd be wishing for the benefits of loss if I'd saved the thing, but so it goes. Sabr, walid, sabr.

We did a "drop-off" yesterday morning. What this means is that we--forty of us, two groups combined as one for Orientation--got on a bus and, one by one, were let out at some random, I don't think predetermined, spot in the city of Rabat. We were given a theme to look for and report back on (mine was "trade, finance, commerce"; another, Z, was, of course, architecture, and I'm sick of only talking to you about architecture, but it's true: this is the place for people interested in monotheistic religious spaces), but really the point was for us to find our way back to the Center, with or without Arabic or French, with or without a map, with just 20 dirham and emergency phone numbers, just in case--and yet, who dared use those?...

I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am they did this. Hate/love to say it, but: so un-American. So rightly challenging. During all of our safety, "Welcome to Morocco" meetings, similarly, everything came down to "Use your judgment". They gave us rigmarole safety guidelines ("for your American institutions"), but with humor, because, clearly!, there's no way one way to be here but be here (the shahadah, "No God but God", modified?), pay attention (see present thoughts on "tolerance"). The dirhams, the emergency phone numbers: these were crutches, right? Not hand-holding at all, but crutches...crutches in the sort of way that setting aside time every day to "retreat" (a weighted word) can be a crutch to moving forward abroad. Not a bad thing, then, crutches. (Born broken?)

When they left me off on the median of a mostly empty four lane street across from the Chinese ambassador's house, I didn't have any idea which way to go. It was wonderful. I didn't want that feeling to go just yet, it really was this/that (Chuang Tzu) much-hyped "not being while being"; it was too good. I felt it ending as it began, so I ran across the street and bummed a cigarette from two engineers...who then (of course?) detained me for longer than I meant to be detained because they wanted to me to play in the pick-up game they were organizing for after-work. Don't get them wrong: I don't think it was that they liked me or were fooled by my Puma jacket (though they wanted to know where I got it). They just needed another man, and I had showed up.

One general impression, though, indirectly relevant: Morocco is the most "tolerant" place I have ever been. Terrible word at this point: tolerant. But better to make it mean what you want it to mean than cringe at its sound, I think. Now, obviously: This is not the "tolerance" of the US. The side-by-side lives of strict Muslims and secular Western "cosmo" citizens, Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans, 21st and 11th century--the coexistence here isn't codified, it's deeper than that; it is (a) fundamental, Morocco wouldn't work otherwise; it isn't an adornment; you submit to tolerance, rather than choose it as some vague political platform. For e.g. my being Jewish matters less here than it does in Manhattan, where one-word identities are encouraged, used to create identiy. Part of it, I think, is that so many Moroccans are fundamentally comprised of too many single words; it is that sort of place, a "crossroads".

But even more, the heterogeneous mass here is a completely different phenomenon from the archetypal American heterogeneous mass. In New York, e.g., (or at SC), you earn your identity, you're somebody OR nobody, you constantly have to assert yourself, you "make it", the diversity that surrounds you is meant to make you more you (if you can handle it, as if we were born so solo). Here, it seems, your individuality is predicated on your essentialness to the mass, which mass must be diverse in order to be a model for a world mass. On a daily basis, generally, a first (definitely amendable; most likely simplified; but honest) impression, then: here, you look ("secretly", says one professor) for your similarities with others, not for the ways you can define yourself against them.

The thing about being part of this crowd is that your identity, your mattering, depends on your brother (to use their language). When you make eye contact with someone, they activate you, you them; it really is sort of sci-fi; what passes between your eyes (Jen, in Confucianism) is what realizes you. Steph: Merkel, qualified, maybe. You're responsible to activate everyone--that you can. Or should you make as much eye contact as possible? Wouldn't that water it down? Or can life-essence, Jung's rhizome, not be watered down?

Also, on the world umma: Pan-Islam my ass. Hate to make an important point with my ass, but Moroccan Islam, just like Moroccan Arabic, is unique, distinct, and--if not explicitly--it thinks it is more right than, say, Syrian Islam. Isn't this intellectual (political, in worse form) competition? It is productive competition--the deeper, general Islam should be the result of , the consensus made from, so many clashing interpretations--on an individual level, on a state level. I don't know enough about this yet, but I may make it my final project at the nearby theology college--how Islam travels; what it is to practice Egyptian Islam in Morocco; Moroccan Islam in Spain; if that's even possible: do you change the place that much or does the place subsume you or reject you?-- where a professor I met today teaches.

I think you can compare the constant (i.e. minute by minute) forming of social identity that marks, e.g., Manhattan life, with the constant (i.e. microsecondly) forming of religious identity that marks the daily life of even a non-Orthodox Muslim (see daily prayer). If it's inevitable, wouldn't you prefer God?

Am I romanticizing? Then I am romanticizing. I'm not sure how much of this I am seeing and how much of this I am there, but, like I said supra, filters (Ojala!) seem irrelevant.

The daily prayer given by the muezzin. It comes 5x a day from the tops of skinny towers called minarets, which adjoin mosques. It's that sort of lupus-inspired howl you hear at the beginnings of movies like the Kingdom. Most of us get it simulated first, then; in an artificial context; in the medium of a bland editorial message. I anticipated, but didn't know, what it would feel like to hear it, for real; clearly, it's part, or all, that I have not really heard it before--but am some point, no Muslim has ever heard it before, either, right? It come sat the same time, every day. Allahu Akbar. God is Great. Mohammed is His Prophet. It's a reminder. It comes at the same time, but the muezzins in a big city start and end like in a round. They repeat themselves and go on for various amounts of times; there are varying degrees of talent re: singing/yelling, but they all have desperation in common.

It is routine desperation, which seems like a contradiction. But that's the point; it is absurd. What if a Muezzin is taking a shit at 7:26? Clearly, religion serves to give a stability, marking points, little meanings...order to a world which, by scientific definition, is random. It's a response to the cruelty of vagaries, sure...but the deep power of the absurdity of this desperate routine disables from me believing that such a retreat to the artificial ordering of life provided by religion is merely that of the weak-willed man or woman who is outsourcing his existential duty. If this is a copout, it's a brave one.

It's almost like the forced, i.e. fake, routine, desperation works to create real desperation. (A misreading of Baudrillard might automatically conclude he'd hate that; add James: if it works). I mean, you act in order to maybe feel what you're acting like you feel, right, baby?

And isn't desperation the best response to this?

It's the self-consciousness of the call to prayer that I love, too. The people who ignore it on the streets, and there are many in Morocco, actually I think add to its beauty and power. The way that New Yorkers don't flinch when ambulances roar by reminds me of this.

Also, there is one man in one of these alleys I walk through to get back to the Hotel Majestic from the Center, which man is a muezzin sans tower...he stands in this narrow alley and sings/yells God is Great as if he were in a tower and when me and this one girl, Hannah, thoughr he wouldn't acknowledge us like some dumb Buckingham guard, but when we passed he looked right at us, stuck his head forward, raised his hand like he had a staff and went, Ba!

You should see the way these people move at night (too hot to shop during the day) down a long market avenue. Inexorably. It's only when you get pulled into an alley or a home by someone who knows you that you matter.

On my way back to the CCCL; carried--

There's a saying in Morocco: between a cafe and a cafe, a cafe. All with outdoor seating, men sit in pairs or alone, sullenly stubbing out cigarettes, doing the crossword puzzle (which they buy copied by someone who tears it out and makes 100 copies), staring ahead or talking to one another without making eye contact. Like unseated judges. I took a picture of one of these cafe fronts from across the street, pointing the camera at the men with my head turned casually the other way. Always this problem of taking pictures of the people. Anyway, I don't think they fell for it (one anomalous young man gave an American thumbs up).

Men everywhere. Women are inside, or hidden, in pairs (they walk on the walls like thieves and whisper things I'd die to hear behind raised, palmey have business in modern institutions. -in hands), but men: everywhere. Some "modern" (i.e. non-Orthodox) women prominent, but they are alone and always look like they have some important business in another country, at least not here, but men, everywhere. Holding hands...linking pinkies! Smoking, embracing, looking at the women walking with you, selling you something with their eyes.

It may be that I notice the slinking women because I'm looking for it; because they're more noticeable, paradoxically enough, then the women who, in equal numbers, wear high heels, walk alone, wear lipstick, work 9-5s. This is the Muslim world's most liberal society; still, I see extremes. Can you really talk about levels of extremity? Yes, of course--but, no, I don't know. In some near future post, I should list all the things that have changed or happened here in the past 10 years, which changes I've cataloged inside books, on my hand, and on the backs of information sheets. An e.g.: 5 years ago, you could not publicly criticize the king, lest you were imprisoned; today, editorials are published weekly doing just that.

Men everywhere: Steph says she saw the same thing in India. Too much of the things I and other people notice are common to Nicaragua, India, Morocco--every foreign place we go to. I don't know how to reconcile this, for now. Do Moroccans experience any of this as magical? Do I, even?

I think the first thing you notice in a foreign country is the old, then the young.

The stand I bought OJ from on our first day walking to class. I had ordered three (two for my roommates) from a man who, confused, ended up giving me a water bottle plus a plastic bag full of OJ, which plastic bag we suckled on on the roof of the CCCL listening to our first daily prayer. See, the thing is, you order a glass, which they squeeze, then serve, and you drink it there at the stand on the spot, like a large shot of Jack, except so good for you (you do this with fresh snails, too). The morning I first ordered the OJ a woman in heels, who was stopped during her shopping, gorgeous, well-kohled (or was this real?), ordered and downed a glass of orange juice--wordlessly-- right there on the spot, picked up her stuff, moved on. (Did I only experience that as primitive because that's how she made me feel? Regardless, the OJ: Jesus. Dad, Z--remember the OJ at that "famous" diner in Chicago? It's that, better, served with pride, colder. It works.)

Also, at this stand bees swarm about the pastries. But bees aren't fleas, right? It's almost like filth, but looks like a good sign.

And then the OJ Man; the first guy I ordered from tried Arabic (la), then French (non), and then passed me on to a man who seemed more in the know, who immediately spoke to me in Spanish. I answered, ordered...point is, every Moroccan I've met has assumed I'm Spanish. I thought I'd might prefer that but then...a) For once, the Spanish did worse here than the US did and also b) the men and women here my age that I've met so far need the US in a way that I might be able to fulfill. This is true in a lot of places; I want to figure out how specifically in Morocco, And yes, specifically, the US. It's not a real US they're dreaming of, true, sure, but it's a realer US than I think I think, and in between unrealities, at least, face to face, we can create epiphanies (Steph: Levinas).

There is something utterly beautiful and frightening about the way people communicate here. You hear around 5 languages on the street on any given corner; the colloquial Arabic, darija, is comprised of berber, french, Arabic, Spanish. People mix languages mid-sentence. The only point is communication. How you get there is awkward and ugly, and everyone is doing it, though Moroccans have mastered it. In a way, I think trying to communicate says more than what you mean to say. So much of the Arabic language is comprised of ceremonial phrases used to imply your sincerity, complicity, your entering in a conversation, a relationship. A professor today said eye contact was another Moroccan language. If you use your gaze (which is eye contact+), or if someone uses it, people will hold it for longer than you've ever had your gaze held. Women, behind their veils, clearly speak with their eyes; but men do it, too. Men act like women here, actually. The word is ghazal: seduction. (al-Ghazali: my favorite islamic philosopher: the seducer, it turns out. Kierkegaard? Diary of a Seducer? La caza sans murder).

Ghazal, by the way: when men "harass" you here, tell you you are beautiful, that is, it is not harassment; it is an attempt at seduction. Ditto for following you for an hour. On one hand, this gives men too much benefit of the doubt, though actual physical sex crimes are low here, though Ghazal is applied to women, too; on the other, we cry harassment way too easily in the US.

Can we consider one culture better than another? Yes, I think; I should criticize Morocco; but with the fundamental assumption that if the US is, e.g., better in this regard, Morocco is better in that regard.

No in Arabic; Yes in French; Thank you with your hands. When all else fails?

When I reached the corner of the new city opposite the 11th century red brick ramparts of the old medina, which red brick ramparts enclose the Center for Cross Cultural Learning...what I felt...the word isn't relieved; that's too simple. No: just fully there. Like I felt when Sarah and me saw the Cross on the steeple at hour 9 of our 9 hour pilgrimage in Costa Rica. An arbitrary marker made meaningful by me at that precise moment, only that moment (and yet which here I can't not mention that when we saw a telephone pole an hour earlier, me and S, we thought that that was the cross we thought we were looking for). And Steph, they (the ramparts), at 20x the size, in their unreal [to these eyes] actuality, their restored beauty, lastingness, seemed to be mocking old Coleman's set with every inch of their essence. Unfair? Oh well.

Standing before the city gates, arrived, hands on my hips...come on. Who does that anymore?

Almost there, I passed the beggar with his sleeve rolled, which rolled up sleeve serves to show us his bulging, shiny goiter--what do you call a goiter on someone's bicep?-- who I realized then I had realized and been affected by the two days before. Passing him, I was perversely glad to see him. Walladeen Wadeek. May God Help You and Me. Imagine being a landmark.

I passed panties on the street, shoes and shoes, nearly got hit by a motorcycle (here, you yield to the traffic, it doesn't yield to you)...and soon after, I passed the man in a room of wool. It's a room he sits in, no door, almost just carved out of a wall, and it is full to the brim with wool. The old man sits on a wooden stool there with his hands on his knees, half-waiting, half-sleeping, engulfed in his product, in the stuff of sheep he once fed. Immediately next to this room, in a room full to the brim of wool, a little boy sleeps curled up on the bare wooden floor. These two are also landmarks for me right now.

Turning the corner to the Center, having gone through the maze that takes you--you don't take it--to the Center, which maze, I think, is absolutely ideal for a race in very small cars, or just tag...also, it seems to turn deeper into itself...turning the corner, the village idiot took my hand and kissed it, rather than respond to my Salaam (which is the most wonderful thing to offer old men, sometimes women, if they look first). Did he know what I had just done?

We all got there (of course?); Nobody was surprised. I have to say, the people that this trip attracts are good. I like them. They want to be dropped off, not in a dorm, not in London (not quite home, either). I don't know why--or I do: it's easier--I am always ready/eager to be disappointed, to find people outside circles that explicitly exalt me (e.g. SC) to be approaching odious. Anyway, can't do it here, even if part of me wants to. Some of these students aren't and won't be my best friends, still, they want to be dropped off. And that's enough. Everyone made it back by lunch, and there was no talk of how hard or unfair it was. Only talk of how we all thought being dropped off was exactly on target. Even the blonde girl from Bucknell in the Gucci sweatpants was quietly thrilled. Not much was shared about this or that cool experience, which I liked; it's like taking pictures: maybe the conscience prick you feel when you're about to take a picture of two men sitting knee to knee to support the board for some game that looks like chess while linking pinkies--maybe that prick is right, and it's more right to leave it unspoken or unchronicled, to trust your memory or trust that someone else will see it, too.

Walking through the streets here is sensory overload, clearly. Cardamom, mint, nutmeg, paprika, sausage, shit, piss, peanuts, dogs, old men, figs, flowers, perfume, incense. You can make a world of smells. There must people not born smelling. I don't know how else to put this--I don't think I am romanticizing--it is intoxicating. It gets all in your nostrils and carries you. It makes your imagination work, at least.

So many turns to make here.

I have been tired, unusually so. I'd say it's just travel fatigue, but no one else seems tired. I have to wake myself--how? I don't know why--or I do--I am making myself tired. We move in with our host families Saturday. I think I really am simply nervous about that. I want to say things like, I hope I have my privacy, but I won't. I am not sure if I am thinking clearly or not. I am disorganized as Hell, of course, though everything is in mind etc etc...It's not like I am in school. Labass, they say, it's the answer to the greeting, which is the same. Labass. No one has actually said it to me yet but it means No Harm.

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