Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with the same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.
Edmondo De Amicis.
Although, I might mention Genova in the same breath. Another most beautiful city ...
I usually arrive here at my office desk around 8.30am and begin. But it's a slow easing into my day, trying to clear email, catch up on any new (and inspirational) posts that have come in on my google reader overnight, and then there's facebook too.
But this morning, I deactivated that seductive thief of time. Facebook is gone for now. I love the social nature of that particular space but it's too much when I really look what I have in front of me.
In 5 weeks, there is a huge business launch party that must be prepared, with accompanying workshop offer. There is the book I'm putting together on Genova, using my photographs taken since 2008, and channeling my huge passion for that city.
The final touches are being put on the photography e-course but I'm also preparing a series of one-on-one photography coaching and wandering options, as well as more flexible times on journeys to other places for the website.
I'm interviewing Minske Van Wijk about her film in the days ahead. I'm also writing for two other websites but details on the second site still to come.
There is the continuing saga of manually uploading my posts from the old website to the new website. Only 800 or so to go...
Actually, truth be told, I dream about arriving here in the office and saying to assistant, 'Hey there, how about you work on this project this week, and I'll develop this one.' But that's not for now ... that's just a wee dream.
I really hope that your week is a good one. And below ... a photograph I took back in those Istanbul days.
4 April, 2012: An update. I lasted outside of Facebook for just 24 hours. A huge filling broke and I was left with a need to distract myself while I waited for an emergency dental appointment. Facebook, like google reader, brings interesting things into my world at times when I can't create for myself and waiting for a tooth repair did, so very much, interfere with my muse.
My tooth was repaired today but too late, I'm back in the Land of Facebook, although attempting to be measured in my time wandering there.
Yesterday was a day of reorganising the space that we have here in the 3-storey tall narrow house. Gert and I ended up working right through the day, simply because I had decided to create a space of no distractions ... a place to finish this book I've begun.
I have two novel manuscripts started too, and another of interviews with New Zealand climbers. That one went through two very positive publishing meetings before being rejected. Back then, the public wasn't so interested in the crazy beautiful lives of climbers and mountaineers. Other publishers were suggested, those who might take the risk of low sales, but then my mum began dying, I had finally started university, and somehow the manuscript has become another thing that I carry.
There are poems too. A new one that came on the train that took me across Belgium a few days ago. A poem that I like, and I am my toughest critic.
But anyway, photography took over as my dedicated form of expression. You can slip everything into an image. Sometimes it's like a poem, other times it's a novel and tells a story but mostly there is the pleasure is not being sure of what you have captured until you are done.
So I have a writing space now. A huge IKEA table that serves as a desk, and enough shells and stones to break my current desk collection in two while maintaining a beautiful pile of beach treasure on both desks. Facebook, phones and non- related books are all banned from the new space.
However, in moving my writing stuff, in taking my favourite images up there, in moving all of my books on Genova... I created what seemed like a huge space down here in the 'everyday' office place. But even that was fun, moving that bookcase there, those images here, that scarf-hanger too.
We had Paola and Simon over for dinner last night and they were curious to see these changes, the ones I had earlier mentioned being in the midst of over on facebook. Well ... here in the everyday office space, I realised, when looking through their eyes, that these huge changes weren't really so obvious despite the fact that they had felt like a major upheaval. My new writing space was approved of though.
So that's how we spent our Saturday. Dinner was delightful ... aperitivo by Paola and Simon, an Italian rib and sausage casserole by Gert, followed by one of his delicious cherry Clafoutis. Excellent conversations, good people ... a really excellent Saturday.
I'll leave you with one of those photographs that surprised me. I saw this tap dripping in Istanbul, in one of the many ancient places there. I photographed it, ignoring the hustle and bustle of people around me, in that city of 14 million people. Today, I have it here next to me, in a 30x45cm format ... I have to rehang it later but just having it here, so close, made me really see it again. I really love it but couldn't have imagined this capture at the time of taking because it was so beautiful and how do you capture beauty ...
Some extracts: A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.
The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.
...I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.
But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.
Most days we have spent 10 hours out taking photographs, returning to the apartment to organise and process them but I have never managed to keep up ... having taken 586 photographs on Saturday alone. My photo folders are overflowing and after a hectic 48 hours of good people, a beautiful hotel, a niece from New Zealand, 2 kiwis who lives here, a little too much red wine on a warm Istanbul night and amazing photographic opportunities, here I am, processing and trying to put things back in order, having not even had time to view the images taken at 6.30am Saturday out on the Bosphorous.
Istanbul is one of those cities where I can’t stop using my camera, it’s a passion, a compulsion and a pleasure but my body is protesting.
I fly tomorrow.
