The Mosque Electric (running w/trains)

You're allowed--during off-prayer hours--to go into the Grand Mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca. We did that this Saturday. The Mosque is on a promontory jutting out over the Atlantic. It is one of the biggest in the world, etc. You walk across this dizzyingly wide and long courtyard, the kind that tilts, which courtyard is busy with (but not filled by) lots of children let loose and pairs of old people and pigeons (which pigeons are perched on the stadium lighting).

A laser beam shines from the Minaret towards Mecca every night. There is an elevator in the minaret, which the muezzin uses, since the thing is too tall for him to climb by stairs. (Is Heaven getting higher?) The mosque has a titanium retractable roof. One slice of the floor on which daily believers kneel and pray is made of thick glass, so that beneath you, if you're lucky enough to get that slice, you can see the Atlantic washing over the rocks and fish swimming in circles--at least intermittently, while you genuflect. There are loud speakers hidden, built into columns made to look like marble, so that if you're in the back, do not worry, you'll hear the Imam. In the hammam, the pillars are specially designed to absorb moisture, so that they don't oxidize. A Christian Frenchman designed it, since he was King Hassan II's best friend. The chandeliers are electronically lowered, since they are too heavy and high to approach by hand or man. It cost about $20 billion dollars ("the American question"), all of which was gleaned from voluntary public donations (what [who!] is this actually for?).

I'm not too big a fan of (manmade?) bigness. L'Grande was only moving in a negative direction, but really moving that way. Its aims of modern capitalist triumph and superior Islam did not feel so much competing as mismatched; like, the religion was an adornment. I felt like it was some failing of mine in not being moved (positively), which if you think about it is an awful profitable stance--guilty--for a person to take if someone wants to make him into a supplicant, etc... I mean, some of the random niches sporting delicately etched turqoise, cream, and black patterns of marble were impressive; but then all I could think about was how you can produce such detailed artistry on a mass scale...did they actually round up every expert marbleman in Morocco and put him to work on some section of the Mosque...wouldn't that ruin the symmetry and consistency, what with the evidence of personal style that comes with precision...a ruse...

And then, also, when you take the train into Casa you pass Morocco's worst shantytowns (nb: every one of these roofless falling-apart houses had a satellite dish), a nice part of which shantytowns house residents that were bought out of their cheap waterfront property, and moved to where they are now, by the King in 1987--when he was planning to build his mosque.

It is always nice to watch little kids chase something in wide open spaces, though. After L'Grande, we went to the International Book Fair across the road, which sounded much more promising (to me) than it was. Mostly the problem was, clearly, that I couldn't read the majority of the books, and I haven't yet reached the nadir of cultural fetish where merely looking at a foreign language turns me on (though mythically, i.e. not actually according to "experts", you're supposed to be able to do this with the Qu'ran). The thing about the Book Fair, too, the point, was the unending lines and large piles of children. Of course, you know me, I wanted some urbane tea-and-cigarette under a canopy type literary--je ne sais quois--affair...instead, it was a carnival, cigarette butts everywhere, ice cream, music, and books. I couldn't even enjoy standing alone reading Spanish poetry in Venezuela's small section. I suppose it was some government effort to promote literacy in a country where less then 50 percent are literate. Either way, the Book Fair, at least, like L'Grande actually, which showed the same scene in its courtyard, was a surreal field trip.

(At one point in the book fair, when I was in the French section reading theory I had read in English in French, a group of like 8 kids asked if they could take a picture with me. They had seen me--seriously...where?--and wanted to show their friends since their friends wouldn't believe them otherwise. Well.)

(Can you tell I'm coming down? Should I quit writing (for a while?) Should I be doing this in a diary? Writing this to you few separately?)

And otherwise, Casablanca is pretty much Marseilles, supremely sketchy, good for knockoff jeans, hard-to-find expensive bars, and a lot of violently pissed-off Moroccans who have emigrated to the city from less prosperous more rural parts of the country in a test run, or imitation, of migration to Europe.

There's the only Jewish museum in a predominantly Muslim country there, and I am interested and all, but I am resistant, for now. The Hebrew lettering itself was welcoming in a way it never had been before.

I don't remember hearing the call to prayer in Casa, though it has hundreds of mosques, too.

Me and this one kid, John, did make a good spontaneous move in getting several 1 dollar national beers at a local brasserie. After two beers, we were served by the bartender, who got nice, what amounted to unsolicited but deliciously really good rice-a-roni, which we ate too hot because that's what all the other men were doing.

The cybercafes are intense, too. Usually, they are the transformed, previously-unused top floors of actual cafes. In those actual cafes, the men, lots of men, as described; but in the cybercafes above, mostly women, and gay men, and 10 year-old boys, (and foreigners), living out their lives. I don't dare theorize. I just know when I entered a cafe I didn't know where I wanted to go.

(Michael met up with a Moroccan man he met on the internet, who took him to some friend's apartment way out in the burbs and they had this brief gray affair in the projects...which has led, actually led before they met, to the Moroccan man, Khalid, texting Michael every hour with proclamations of love...he calls him Michelle...when they met, Michael said, he was shaking and his hands were wet, and he made Michael walk ahead and meet him round the corner)...

Me, Michael, and John did jump onto a moving train in order to board it on our way back to Rabat. I liked that every second you waited to jump there was a notable difference in how hard it would be to make it. The crosseyed woman with several shopping bags fell before Michael and he helped her, and succeeded, but also outright grabbed her breasts in doing so and caused a ruckus that was funny when it was over (but weirdly not when it was going on).

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