{"id":9692,"date":"2014-11-11T16:43:43","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T00:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=9692"},"modified":"2014-11-30T10:22:30","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T18:22:30","slug":"guest-post-dust-kayakoy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/11\/guest-post-dust-kayakoy\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: In the Dust of Kayak\u00f6y"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPeace is the tranquility of order.\u201d This quote from St. Augustine opened one of the tiny devotional books I used for meditation when I was in high school. The declaration, as I understood it, made sense to me; indeed it seemed self-evident that observing rules, keeping things in their designated places, approaching tasks methodically<\/wbr>, and being organized were all ways of dispelling angst and achieving satisfaction. What else was peace if not that?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to be unfair to my younger self. It\u2019s not that I confused staying out of trouble or getting into college with transcendence; my very truck with the devotional books suggests I was after something deeper. I hardly plumbed the depths of Augustine\u2019s theology, but I was big-picture enough to know where I wanted one day to be buried: Cloonmorris cemetery, in my family\u2019s ancestral parish in Ireland. If you\u2019d asked me at the time what was the most peaceful place I knew, the cemetery is the place I would have named, because it was where I felt most OK with the reality of death. As I see it now, though, there was a problem with my conceptualizing of peace, death, and how the two might be reconciled. The problem had to do with landscaping.<\/p>\n

Earlier in my childhood, Cloonmorris had been overgrown.Stinging nettles reached their stalks around the headstones; grass sprouted in tufts through cracks in the concrete paths; hedgerows encircling the cemetery edge crept steadily toward its center. Green grew where it would, wilderness ascendant. There was beauty in this, no doubt, but I was only conscious of my family\u2019s desire that \u201csomething be done.\u201d We expect certain things of the places where we memorialize our dead. The minimum is that it be tended to, because if it is neglected then it looks like we have forgotten them. If it is neglected, what is to stop us from forgetting them? Lawn mowers, hedge clippers,and weed-whackers <\/wbr>clear encroaching chaos from our garden, as they chase oblivion from our minds.<\/p>\n

Eventually the parish organized its clean-up operation, restoring Cloonmorris to order at roughly the time when I started to think about mortality. I returned one summer in early adolescence and found it transformed like a rescued castaway after a shave. Its neatness, its containment surprised and charmed me. It was always quiet, always lovely, especially at evening. The eye fell on nothing unpleasant. I used to visit just to drink in the calm.<\/p>\n

Life went on, got busier. When I went to Cloonmorris it was to visit the family plot and it felt perfunctory. Then, a couple of summers ago, I travelled to southern Turkey with my cousin.We were in Fethiye, a burst of flowers and fish markets on the Turquoise Coast. It was her idea to visit Kayakoy, a nearby ghost town created by the Turkish-Greek \u201cpopulation exchange\u201dof the 1920s. The innocuous-sounding term refers to the forcible expulsion by their governments of Muslims in Greece and Orthodox Christians in Turkey in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended Turkey\u2019s War of Independence.Christians in Turkey greatly outnumbered Muslims in Greece, and left behind homes that were in many cases left empty. In Kayak\u00f6y lay the husk of an entire community abruptly departed.<\/p>\n

The idea of a settlement surrendered utterly to the animals and the elements intrigued my cousin. Her work as an urban and regional planner surely played into it, especially since Ireland, where she makes her living, was by that time dotted with \u201cghost estates\u201d of its own\u2014housing developments built in bedroom communities during the later part of the country\u2019s boom, unable to attract buyers or even occupants once the recession hit. I was happy to go along and check out the historical artifact of Kayak\u00f6y. We nudged the trip to the end of a day of swimming and boating in the Mediterranean, and arrived to sun unhurriedly setting after a brief, intense evening shower.<\/p>\n

As children my cousin and I often visited Cloonmorris together, at least once using its 13th-century church ruins to act out the drama of a secret Mass raided during the days of the Penal Laws. Maybe being in her company strengthened the association, or perhaps it was the simple novelty of being in a place where you can hear a throat cleared from half a mile away. In any event, as soon as we began climbing the hill in deserted Kayak\u00f6y, following the path that used to be a village street between the ruined houses and shops and churches, I thought: \u201cI have the same feeling as in Cloonmorris.\u201d<\/p>\n

I no longer get that feeling in Cloonmorris, and it\u2019s a joyous sense\u2014a sense that you have slipped your arms into a garment of other people\u2019s memories, people you will never meet or know but whose presence abides, soft and warm as summer dusk. It is a sense of the moment dissolving into the eternal, leaving you in need of nothing and nowhere else. Kayak\u00f6y felt like a graveyard, which indeed it was, but in the most beautiful regard. Its atmosphere suggested that the awful loss it embodies, the sadness of lives crushed and abandoned here, has somehow been reconciled with the dirt that coats every piece of concrete and will devour all this eventually.<\/p>\n

\"image\"It overflowed, you might say, with peace. But the peace of Kayak\u00f6y was more profound to me than that of any designated graveyard. In Cloonmorris I discerned tranquility only after human monuments had been retrieved from Nature, and Nature shorn and manicured, an ing\u00e9nue cast to complement the leading man. That is order, at least to a mind in need of comfort. Impinging weeds distracted us from prayers that require concentration, concentration that in turn requires a sense of order: aesthetic order, but also a reassurance that Nature will not finally upend us. If death is Nature\u2019s trump card, our accustomed response in its presence is to tighten our grip on a losing hand, as though vigilance might change our fates. There is nothing silly about this; undeniably, feeling we control things helps us calm down and cope more easily, so why would we not control what we can?<\/p>\n

One possible answer: to keep ourselves psychologically limber for the inevitable occasions of our helplessness. I\u2019m reminded of the yoga instructor at a gym I once frequented, bursting forth from the glass-walled room where his class was gathered to flap around the boxing area: \u201cStop punching the bags! It’s too noisy!\u201d His yogis were in Shavasana, for God’s sake! Is nothing sacred?<\/p>\n

The whole point of yoga, according to my elementary understanding, is to find your inner order amidst the chaos. To live with the chaos. To use the chaos, even, because once the fire gets going almost anything can serve as fuel. And like this, in Kayak\u00f6y it\u2019s the very chaos\u2014reclaiming day by day, year by year, decade by decade this once- functional town\u2014that casts a spell. Pieces of stucco litter the ground like rubble from a slow explosion. You step across the disintegrating thresholds or inside the cavernous church, and there comes a gentle release of tension as you absorb how all the jobs, obligations, exhilarations and disappointments, all the intrigues and schedules that make up daily bustle, are subject to the creeping advance of an effortless wilderness.<\/p>\n

The sun dwindled, a swirl of honey-warm colors. We took flatteringly-lit pictures of ourselves on the bare plaza by the church. We saw only a handful of other visitors\u2014I almost want to say pilgrims\u2014across the village\u2019s several hillsides. We thought what fine horror films could be set here, and what horrifying, many-legged specimens no doubt lurked beneath the stones. Darkness approached slowly, as though mindful of our reluctance to go.<\/p>\n

It was the hour for lovers. Descending toward the main road as charcoal twilight filled the air, we met an Australian couple observing a pair of tortoises that stood, one in front of the other,in the dirt. The couple said they weren\u2019t sure if the animals were mating or fighting. One tortoise emphatically rammed the other, bumper car-style, with his shell.<\/p>\n

The Australians had somewhere else to be and walked off. As soon as they did, one tortoise mounted the other and emitted long, high-pitched cries while his partner silently acquiesced.We stayed for some time; it\u2019s not every day you stumble upon such sluggish creatures getting busy. But they were in no uncharacteristic hurry, and it was almost time for the hourly bus back to Fethiye, so we left them to their sport. Beside the bus stop on the main road was a caf\u00e9 with a sign mentioning g\u00f6zleme, Turkish pancakes. My cousin was hungry, so we walked in to see if we might have one to go.<\/p>\n

A clutch of men huddled at a table, talking. One, the proprietor, rose as we entered. We told him what we wanted. \u201cDo we have enough time before the next bus?\u201d My cousin indicated her wrist, then the road outside.<\/p>\n

The proprietor was friendly and very confident. He closed his eyes and nodded to assure us, shouting loudly as he did so to someone in the back. A plump young woman entered, looking put out. It was clear, understanding no Turkish, that there was an art to her pancake-making and she was tired of this man\u2014her husband? Her father?\u2014showing no regard for her process. Still displeased, she sat down by the low table where the dough is rolled and set about her work. Minutes ticked by. We raised our eyebrows at the proprietor and he patted the air with his hand, the universal sign for \u201cIt\u2019s under control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll tell you exactly what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d said my cousin,amused. \u201cHe is going to stop that bus and have it wait.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was, in fact, what happened. The proprietor waved the driver down and shouted something to him. I boarded; two minutes later, my cousin arrived with dinner in hand, and the bus rolled on.<\/p>\n

My cousin understood that this would happen because Ireland used to be more like Turkey. Back when Cloonmorris was choked with nettles and the economy was a shambles, a Bus Eireann driver would probably have waited for someone to finish cooking a pancake. And there\u2019s something wonderful about that. It\u2019s a gross and rather offensive oversimplification to claim that life is better in a country that\u2019s never known modern prosperity. But it\u2019s difficult to imagine a modern economy letting us get away with the kind of attitude that proprietor displayed, and it\u2019s an attitude that seems manifestly healthy.Contrast it with the alternative, as bemoaned by Tom Hodgkinson in his 2005 book How to Be Idle: people so fixated with not \u201cwasting time\u201d that over-the-counter medicines are almost invariably touted for how quickly they will get you back on the ball, back in the saddle, back on the job. There\u2019s something quite sick about a society that doesn\u2019t have time to be.<\/p>\n

The rub is, everyone in a society must consent to some chaos for its benefits to be felt. When my boss isn\u2019t too fussed about punctuality, then I as a bus passenger am not too upset that the bus is waiting for someone who\u2019s not punctual. So I don\u2019t berate the driver for indulging her. This makes the driver more likely to wait whenever necessary, which in turn makes everyone more frequently late to work, and the bosses and parents and lovers of the country more understanding of a bit of tardiness here or there, in a vast forgiving circle of unhurried living.<\/p>\n

But when the tide rises it carries all boats, and soon most boats are empty because no one has time to sail. The buses, meanwhile, are full of people understandably tense about getting there promptly. They belong to an ordered human enterprise that makes efficient use of their time. It is an astonishing enterprise; because of it we have penicillin, anesthetic, air travel, legal recourse, and numberless other innovatio<\/wbr>ns mitigating oursuffering in such ponderous ways that I can scarcely conceptualize the hardship, physical and otherwise, that characterized every life on Earth in earlier centuries.\"image(1)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet it is also a mode of denial. Its achievements persuade us that human desire and human drive make not just an impressive team, but an invincible one. We will subdue the Earth, and all its beasts. That is the final word. That is order.<\/p>\n

In Kayak\u00f6y, another order can be perceived. It allows tortoises time for romance. They don\u2019t see too many threats, too many people barging anywhere. Theirs is all the time in the wilderness\u2014a wilderness of infinite patience that is wresting nothing in this little plot of land, but waiting, waiting, waiting.<\/p>\n

Marie Glancy O’Shea is a roving writer and editor who — get this — can’t be found much online.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPeace is the tranquility of order.\u201d This quote from St. Augustine opened one of the tiny devotional books I used for meditation when I was in high school. The declaration, as I understood it, made sense to me; indeed it seemed self-evident that observing rules, keeping things in their designated places, approaching tasks methodically, and … <\/p>\n


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