A list

As salat al-fajr (the dawn prayer) is called this morning--rustily, I think--I indulge in the workaday pleasure of composing a to-do list, albeit slightly turned away from the usual chaff to do with management of money and my own labor. This time I’m indulging in a list of sights to see, "experiences" to have, and perhaps, at the outside, people to correspond with. Notwithstanding which, or even as a function of which, depending, I should like to note that purchasing some original Izmir tile, or any Ottoman craft if at all within my means, seems as sound an investment as any. And, by the (noting) way, that this morning my mind seems ever to have skipped to something else by the time my pen moves to mop up whatever progression of morsels were previously in its eye, or teeth, or hand or mouth. That has a ring to it: In my all-devouring (pantophagor) mind's mouth, I digested a morsel. Or: Living from mind's hand to mind's mouth.
Enough, enough! Now for a plunge into sights future and potential, before backpedaling into a treatment of sights seen.

1. I want to bathe in a hammam. One of those stone-built Turkish baths deep in the bowels of some building where foreign voices are muted by hissing jets of steam. Which brings me to a half-waking question I asked myself earlier. Why, if gay men can visit a gay bathhouse and have casual, even anonymous sex, and this arrangement is accepted as a by and large legitimate manifestation of their sexuality; why then are no similar bathhouse arrangements possible for straight pleasure-seekers who wish to take the waters, and something else besides? Has anyone ever heard of a co-ed heterosexual bathhouse that acts as a sexual crucible? Sex among men and women that is truly casual is hard to come by. And perhaps that is as it should be. After all, no matter how effective the contraception, heterosexual coitus cannot be separated in form from the serious business of reproduction.

Only in a culture (or world) without a trace of hope* for future generations—or where sex had been irrevocably divorced from the business of reproduction, with the pair's latter half invested in the holy offices (labs) of gene science (obviously an arrangement that applies only to the rich, or to those who submit to the reproductive imperatives of Power), could we conceive of a bathhouse where men and women met for sex that, divested of the merest vanishing trace of sacred generative power, was truly casual. This thought spawns another: If reproduction (and its specter) were somehow totally cut out of the arrangement, would then a different logic apply to the selection of partners? I'll admit it's ridiculous right here, since so much of this business is impulsive and instinctual anyway. Men would still be attracted to the curves that denote the ability to bear and rear children, women still so to the hard lines and size that bespeak the ability to protect.
One thing that might disappear in the bathhouse of a culture’s twilight, though, is what might be termed speculative prostitution—when the body is offered in response to perceived wealth, on speculation of reward. Or at least the genetically (i.e. the promise of a safe childrearing environment) motivated branch of that behavior might disappear.

But no—I am getting ensnared in these speculations. I despair of their foolishness. On the one hand, if the production of new people were entrusted to magician-scientists, there is no guarantee that heterosexual sex would survive. All the mysteries—that vestige of sacredness (that "utopian trace" enshrined to this day in the institution of marriage, and negatively apparent in the opprobrium piled on the harlot) that attends heterosexual sex even today—would be lost. And lacking that sacredness, and even especially the cynical mock sacredness flogged by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all the rest, what would drive the sexes to seek each other’s company? What, indeed, would keep alive any distinction between the sexes? If it is all taken care of in the lab, what need to attract the other by honing and displaying one's physical attributes, or through various social and intellectual flourishes to "demonstrate value?"

We have already begun to witness a tendency toward androgyny in the west. Witness metrosexuality. Witness the worship en masse of ephebic males and of waiflike boy-women who, in their quest of a supposed bodily perfection, deny that body its fertility. Witness the ever-increasing swapping and reversal of gender roles, and witness especially the tendency, among intellectual and technical elites, to define the self beyond the pale of sex. A bad thing? It is a thing like any other. Though it is something Islam has a problem with, in case you weren’t paying attention.

Or take the obverse of the coin: Cultural twilight, nihilism. Imagine you are on a doomed flight. Now consider the act of (heterosexual) sex as your final. Even assuming there is enough time, and that the mechanics are workable, is there not something obscene to the thought of having sex during your last minutes over the earth? (Note that this is not to be confused, either with becoming a member of the mile high club, or with dying of a heart attack during orgasm, both of which I hold to be desirable, the latter ideal) Never mind the old notion of death being something to face down stoically, alone. It’s the wisdom of repugnance, I say! Seriously now (calm down!), I can’t vouch for others' way of thinking, but when I think of being in a situation preliminary to a known catastrophic death, I think I would want to hold a woman, kiss her—I just can't see wanting sex. Isn't this because, whether we like it or not, the heterosexual act still has this aura of hallowedness about it, stemming from its (still) central role in the powerfully mysterious business of creating new humans? When in speaking of "casual sex" we say that it has become an empty ritual, I suspect that we do not quite believe it. Rituals involve us in processes that are greater than ourselves, and that is why we participate in them. Now imagine a somewhat more prolonged twilight, i.e. a nuclear winter. Obviously not the time to bring a child into the world, but beyond that even—let's say contraceptives are used—isn't it a sacrilege of sorts to commit the joyful act as the world is dying? Witness the scarcity of August babies.

That said, I think that a truly active heterosexual bathhouse will remain the stuff of fantasy. It may be a thrilling fantasy—who doesn't enjoy an occasional peep into the abyss of dissipation and irreverence? By way of closing I would like to mention that I can sense another can of worms ready to burst. Its label reads that there are those among us in the West who, despairing of all things, are of the opinion that it is wrong to bring children into the world as it is, despite the lack of any certain ending to our breakneck age—and who, acting with a truly moral consistency, eschew sex. These are the harbingers of the forlorn sight of the empty twilight bathhouse. Just a morsel for thought.
So that is one thing I need to do, is visit a Turkish bathhouse. The plan is to do so today.
2. Next up is the Hippodrome, that much celebrated center of Byzantine and then Ottoman political life. Forgive the flourish: It's almost verbatim from the Lonely Planet, that non plus ultra of forgettable bombast. I dare them to say "undiscovered gem" one more time. I fucking dare them. Regardless, the Hippodrome is where chariot races and wrestling bouts determined the faction that had political favor with emperors and sultans. I don’t aim to get into a lengthy treatment of this—I know very little of Roman, Byzantine or Ottoman history—but it brings me back to something I wrote in my first post on this trip. About how it is exciting to be able to read past chapters of history in the monuments that have survived its spasms and cataclysms into the present. That Istanbul gives an exciting feeling because it reads like a palimpsest. All very true. And which may lead visitor and denizen alike to make claims about the antiquity of a place. As opposed to, say, the New World. Or to Australia. Or to Scandinavia, which to my eyes has always seemed so newly civilized. What I’m getting at is this: Almost every land is antique in terms of human habitation. Our perceptions of antiqueness are conditioned by the survival of written documents and by the practice of having built in stone. These are the hallmarks of antiquity after all. I have been reading a book called The Conquest of America by Francis Jennings. It deals with the dispossession of the Indians of New England, and with the myths of civilization, and chosenness, and manifest destiny, as well as the legal fictions used first to justify and then to forget that dispossession. The point is that our land is also very much an antique one. In Boston, the book mentions, researchers carbon-dated an unearthed fish weir, and found its wood to have been felled some 4,000 years ago. Which in its own understated way provoked in me the same sense of sublimity and wonder that filled me yesterday in the Church of the Divine Wisdom, when I considered that that magnificent cathedral had been built a millennium and a half ago. The signs of what and who came before are everywhere. In North America, they are insubstantial, spectral, buried beneath centuries of mutually reinforcing violence and amnesia. It should come as no wonder that so very much of our landscape seems haunted, upon closer inspection, by reminders of the dead that are just faint enough to be disturbing.There are some other things I want to do before I leave on Saturday, like go out on the town one night, but if I begin to write about that I may lose myself in a mire of verbiage. Until next time then, I remain your faithful correspondent.