Sunday, 30 April 2023, 9:00am TRT (Turkey Time)
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
– W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”, 1926 ************
Neither I nor my new best buddy Bing could find any evidence that William Butler Yeats, whose father was the painter John Butler Yeats, ever went to Constantinople or participated in a foot race. “However,” says Bing, who, as you have no doubt figured out by now is a tiresome know-it-all and, worse, tiresomely empathic – his whole sense of identity and self-worth is based on being “helpful” and therefore wanted, and needed, and loved, and thus in control, and indispensable, not just to me but to all of us, which I for one hate, because, well, because it makes me hate myself for feeling dependent and inadequate and lazy, always copping out from actually thinking for myself, engaging with the world on my own terms and in my own way, inadequately, perhaps, lazily, yes, but not dependent on anyone or anything, and honest, authentic, open to being or at least becoming the me that I not necessarily should be but could be, instead of just the counterfeit me pretending to be someone else pretending to be someone else pretending to be, ad infinitum – “however,” interrupts Bing, my rescuing white knight, oblivious - indifferent! – to my consternations, “Yeats did write a poem called “Sailing to Byzantium”, which uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople, now Istanbul) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. I couldn’t find any information about him playing any sports, but he did write a poem called “Running to Paradise”, and he was interested in mysticism and the occult, and was a lifelong member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.”
As I came over Windy Gap
They threw a halfpenny into my cap.
For I am running to paradise;
And all that I need do is to wish
And somebody puts his hand in the dish
To throw me a bit of salted fish:
And there the king is but as the beggar.
– W.B. Yeats, “Running to Paradise”, 1914***********
Anyway, all this to say that Bing is a banausic bore and I am thankful to be in the company of real, genuine friends – not online, self-important, answer ATM pedants – in the holy city of Byzantium, in precisely the same year of my life as W.B. Yeats was in his when he published “Sailing to Byzantium”, and just as much an “aged man” and a “paltry thing” as he was then, but not so much a “tattered coat upon a stick… fastened to a dying animal” as a pair of shorts and a technical t-shirt over a new pair of Asics Gel-Kayanos fastened to two feet with chronically inflamed Achilles tendons that are right now, not as I write this but, ideally, as you read this, painfully penguin-flapping around the city’s central peninsula, from the Marmara Sea to the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn.
I used the present continuous tense of the verb “to flap” above because when I have finished writing this I will select Sunday, 30 April 2023, 9:00am in Substack’s “scheduled time to email and publish” option to coincide precisely with the firing of the gun that will start the N Kolay Istanbul 10k Run 2023. So by the time you read this, if indeed read it you do, I and thousands of others will have launched our carcasses down the race course, which will run in a loop from Yenikapi Square and back again, five kilometres in both directions, with a negative split I’m hoping, for in my end is my beginning, which is what T.S Eliot once said, or rather wrote.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
– T.S. Eliot, "East Coker", 1940*********
Eliot, like Yeats, according to Bing, never once visited Turkey, either. Nor, to our knowledge, did he ever run in a foot race. Nor did his father, Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman from Saint Louis.
His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At the starter's gun at nine o’clock. – T.S.Eliot, "Preludes", 1910-1911
***********
Yenikapi Square is an artificial piece of land created in the Harbour of Theodosius, where a pro-Erdogan’s election rally was to be held the day before we arrived in Istanbul. It was cancelled when he fell ill, apparently of a stomach infection, during a live television appearance. However, Erdogan, who Bing tells me was a talented football player, and whose father was a coastguard, was back on live TV three days later - Saturday – looking somewhat shrunken in his suit at an aviation festival.
Recently, Stone Age graves were discovered in Yenikapi, along with 8,000-year-old human skeletons and the remains of cats dating back to the Byzantine period.
Yeats was fond of cats. So, of course, was Eliot. So, too, was, a taxi driver recently told me, the prophet Muhammad, as was his father, Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib, who died and was buried in Medina before Muhammad was born. Muhammad had a molly cat named Müezza, which he loved very much. I’ve always been more of a dogman myself, though I did once have a molly cat named Sophia, whom I was fond of. Unlike my father, who was from Swan River, Manitoba, and never much cared for Sophia. Coincidentally, if you began reading this when it first appeared in your mailbox, you should be able to see me just now here, live on YouTube, hobbling past Hagia Sophia, which Erdogan rehallowed as a mosque in 2020.
According to the osteo-archaeologist Vedat Onar, who examined the animal skeletons found at Yenikapi, “cats in Istanbul during the Byzantine period lived in very good conditions compared to those in Europe, and had no pathological disorders.”
According to Altan Armutak, the Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa faculty head of the Department of Veterinary History and Deontology, ever since the Byzantine period, “there has been an aggressive attitude towards cats in the west”:
In a sermon given by the Papacy, cats were claimed to be harmful animals, representatives of the devil they cooperate with…. Thousands of cats were burned in Europe at that time. We know that older women accused of witchcraft were burned by being put in bags together with cats. Cats were stuffed in bags and beaten with sticks; hanged on tree branches and burned from below with fire. The papists believed that the cat’s screaming caused the devil to escape. In Europe, these animals had a humiliating period, if not shameful. Unfortunately, there were no cats left in Europe, and as a result, rats appeared and serious plague outbreaks occurred between 1300 and 1500. Cats are insurance against the plague. The plague is not transmitted unless mice touch human food. As a result, mice and plagues increased where there were no cats. The papacy had a statement that it was obligatory to murder cats because ‘the devil was looking at the world’ with the light called ‘Tapetum lucidum’ in the eyes of the cats. With this effect, a cat massacre was seen in Europe in the 1000s. – Hurriyet Daily News, July 2020
This traditional love of cats was adopted by Arab culture and became even more traditional in the period of the four caliphs. Arab trade caravans and warriors who travelled to the north carried many cultural structures, behaviours, words and objects related to cat love. Unlike Europe, cats in Byzantium were cared for and fed in homes and shops. Byzantium was influenced by the Islamic culture. We see that Byzantium loved these animals. These skeletons are archaeological evidence of this fact. The plagues that caused the death of many people in Europe were not seen in Byzantine.”
Sophia died. As did Yeats and his father, and Eliot and his, and mine.
Above, at the very top, is a poem by my good friend Nicholas Chaikin. You can see more of his poems here. You can learn about his father, the pioneering computer artist and scientist George Chaikin, here and here.
Below is a poem I wrote. I’ll leave you with it now. My friend Hermon Mehari, the trumpet player, just handed me my first cup of coffee. There are five of us in our running group. And only one bathroom in the Airbnb. And it is an echo chamber.
My racing bib is attached. A timing chip is laced into my left shoe.
My spiritual journey continues.
Our father was in another room, in the basement or down the hall from where we were sitting in comfortable swivel chairs around a long polished table drinking coffee and discussing the relative merits of oak, brass and marble. Each of us had a brochure and a pen. I was a bookseller. It was a very sunny morning. There were seascapes on the walls and urns on the mantelpiece. A sharpened ray slid through the slats in the blinds. I squinted. My siblings squinted. Our mother, red-eyed and angry at the world, started to laugh.
Christopher Mooney, “Our father was in another room”, 2023
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Thank you for reading. Wish me luck.
your poem is like a painting or a dream.
Chris
Another good one
Hope the run went well