Palimpsest - from Gurbet'ten Sonra

مقامة الطرس

something by means of something, Ross Thames said to us:

Perched on the wharf of enchantment, the southern bowl of trees in the park, unmoved like a calm star in a firmament of errant celestial clutter, lopsided families and blackhole hawkers, I looked out on the bay. I Selaam’ed a barge going nowhere, the bridge linking Whitman to Wall Street, the leaf of grass to the Dollar leaf, and the blue blue sky.

They had let me off early from the office, all of the packets had been assembled in a big sprawl on the carpeted office floor, and they signed off on my hours without having me wait for the stamps to arrive and to be squished onto their corners. Laminate sheet, cover letter, product portfolio, web recommendations, return mail, laminate sheet, all in the envelope.  Laminate sheet, cover letter, product portfolio, web recommendations, return mail, laminate sheet, all in the envelope.  Laminate sheet, cover letter, product portfolio, web recommendations, return mail, laminate sheet, all in the envelope. But 5alas, no more forms to be formed, no more documents to document.  My humor was perked up by a munificent kütle of Rafiqi’s cart meat, and my mind was flitting from verse to verse.  

أطلق سراح الأرض و أسجن السماء ثم أسقط كي أظل أميناَ للضوء كي أجعل العالم غامضاً ساحراً متغيراً خطراً كي أعلن التخطي

دم الالهة طري على ثيابي. صرخت نورس تصعد بين أوراقي- فلأحمل كلماتي ولأمض

    Friday, early afternoon, getting paid to perch on the handrail and look out at the bay. Down the way from me was some lanky form draped in cream green sheets and a plastic mask bothering tourists. It tucked its copper torch underneath its armit to adjust the green cloth which had sunken off its hip, revealing basketball shorts. A patriarch in a baseball hat negotiated the situation with mouth agape, as the lumbering spectre enshrouded his only daughter in his sooty clutches, extorting monies in exchange for a photo. The mom ended the matter with a bluster of curses.

    What a day. What to make with it? The whole island behind me. While I made up my mind, I enjoyed the womanzara.  Always the connoisseur of convex curves, the waxing and waning gibbous of lunatic venusians, and vigored by the day, I need only turn from the waters to the fire, posing against the railing for some تهذيب eve-teasing.

A harem of of denim-clad avrat had just disembarked from the beastly vessel tying the mainland with وليات اطاسى  . They came gabbing and preening down the pavement. One had a curly wet coiffe festooned with a scrunchy.

وفرع يغشي المتن أسود فاحم أثيث كقنو النخلة المتعثكل

She looked over her shoulder at another friend chewing gum. They conversed in the coarse pidgin of their wild isle.  

“I swayr tuh Gooooooohd.”

“I’m gonna bust her fuckin’ teet, dat’s what I’m gunna do, duh skank”

The sun in its radiant bewitchment, shone on these verdant maidens. But rather than bringing forth shoots and petals as it did with greenery, it had struck garments from their limbs and necks as though in the annual autumnal jettisoning of leaf. Finally, tank tops and skirts. The tender pale flesh of exposed fruit.

مهفهفة بيضاء غير مفاضة ترائبها مصقولة كالسجنج

كبكر مقاناة البياض بصفرة غذاها نمعر الماء غير المحلل

I looked on bashfully as they walked by. N’ere to disturb these heavenly bodies in their orbit, as unassuming in the firmament as السرطان  , with as base and askant a glance withal. The shy peak over the horizon with my astrolobe. But just down the quay, this ceremony performed with mild posture was bida’ed  by a pack of wild rickshaw drivers, lurching over their handlebars to catch every last glimpse.   

نمی دانم چہ منزل بود ، شب جائے کہ من بودم

بہ ہر سو رقص بسمل بود ، شب جائے کہ من بودم

پری پیکر نگارے، سرو قدے، لالہ رخسارے

سراپا آفت دل بود

ugh, şerefsiz

Just after them came some farangi tourists, a mother and daughter pair, arguing about how to make it across to lady liberty. Was it Italian they were speaking? The daughter so lovely, as tart and şımarık as redolent melon grown in the shade, had her arms crossed, mortified to be trailed by her flailing tan-leather mother. The laces of her overly fashioned unfurling top made her youthful breasts look like a seductive carnivorous plant. No doubt the corporate rickshaw wallas would soon be  word-groping at Eve’s forbidden fruit.  

There was the tall blonde with the traveller backpack, the serene Korean peri,  the procession of beautiful young women jogging by in matching gym shorts, an endless parade of delight. And then lastly, well-found in this earthly Jannah,  a matchless brunette with bangs and glasses. A real dil-rüba. She sat on a bench across from the water, writing into a journal she had brought with her. I couldn’t help but stare like  الكلب الأكبر She was so lovely. Then, a lock of hair tumbled from behind her ear, and as she scooped it back from her face, she looked up and gave me a brief smile.

چوزلمه زلفه ای دلربا دل بغلایانلردن

قاچنمه أتش عشقکله باغرک داغلایانلردن

دوشر می اجتناب ایتمک سنکچون آغلایانلردن

سرشک چشممک باق فرقی وار می چاغلایانلردن

Alright, enough of that. Let us proceed up this mighty earthen barge of surveillanced thrills. Through the tower peaks!

All that week working downtown I had thought about Khalid. The office tower overlooked Washington street and I had packed the book that day. I wondered if I could trace Khalid’s steps, contemplate the اطلال of Little Syria somewhere among the skyscrapers downtown. There had to be some layers unearthed amongst what was left to be found of concrete ash from the Twin Towers, an empty bag of cement from the construction of the Battery Tunnel, a cathode ray tube from Radio Row,  a negative of Berenice Abbott’s, some futurists scribbled manifesto, the sifter from one of the Hudson Dusters, some flatware from the steamboat Hendrick Hudson, a newsie’s twine, the broken molar of a Draft Rioter, Sturgeon bones, a slave’s shackles, a chip of Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg,  Indian beads, all somewhere under the air-conditioned drugstores and condos.

I headed up a wide avenue past a funerary tower, a birthday cake parking garage, and a left before I got to Thunder Lingerie. At the next intersection I took a good look around. Large concrete walls, scaffolding, and the massive construction site for the new tower up at the end of the street. Between Rector and Morris street there had once been the home to a dozen Arab language American newspapers: Al-Kleemat, Mirat Al-gharb, Ash-Shaab, As-Sameer, Al-Janyat, Al-Bayan, and the great Al-Hoda. Now some stupid privately owned public space with people drinking lattes in the sun. Son of the Sheik restaurant, زره مرة تزره دائما  was at 77 Washington, now a garage for cop scooters. Where now stood a dumpster robed in blue tarp was once S.F. Zaloom and Co., importers of Syrian groceries, the romantic allegory  of its advertisements would make you think that Gibran Khalil Gibran had written copy for them.

- في المثل - كل قليلا تعش كثيرا و نحن نقول ان هذا القليل يجب ان يكون مغذيا فإذا اردت ايها المواطن الكريم ان تهتم بصحتك و صحة عيالك فلا تنس ان الشرط الاول لحسن الصحة هو ان تكون مأكولاتك مغذية و خالية من كل غش فاذا عرفت ذلك فشرف محلنا حيث يوجد كل انواع السمانة السورية الفاخرة من مأكولات و مشروبات -                              

I imagine him somewhere, catching his breath on the Hudson away from the sooty alleyways, twizzling his moustache and letting his heart get wrenched with the hanin of Bsharri. Looking through dusty shop windows

GANIM AND SADALLAH

IMPORTERS, EXPORTERS, & COMMISION MERCHANTS

DRY AND FANCY GOODS, JEWELRY, NOTIONS, ETC.  

Strolling with hands behind his back, meeting up with Rihani for a good petticoat oggling down on the green. Like Captain Walt said: it avails not, neither time or place.

But it looks to be all gone. I was disheartened, in need of the mystical salvation of a hot bowl of mojadderah, as I realized there was nothing left. Not even a hyperreal gesture to the past. Just two giant concrete parking garages. The giant tablets of stone of another Moses.  

A block north was more construction, a spine of concrete floors and banging. Condos condos condos condos condos condos.

I paused for a moment in the middle of the block. There was a row of  three facades. Behold! Just after the scaffolding stood proudly a white church, a four floored building with terra cotta flourishes and a mansard roof, and to the left a tenement building with a fire escape. I raced across the street to get a look at the church’s cornerstone.

ST. GEORGE

—SYRIAN—

R.C. CHURCH

A.D. 1929

Billah! I got down on my knees and inspected closely the marble. How lovely, how real. I scurried back across the street to get a better look. A projecting molded sill, interrupted by the buttresses, extending the width of the second floor. Flanking buttresses, crowned above with gablets, a wide sill decorated with recessed quatrefoils and crowned by crockets with foliate caps. And there, in the central bay, was a central lancet niche containing a polychrome terra-cotta relief of St. George and the Dragon!

I tore through my bag. This deserves a christening. A century of modernism and real estate speculation, and this history still stands. My book was nested among papers. I read aloud.

Is it not an ethnic phenomenon that a descendant of the ancient Phœnicians can not understand the meaning and purport of the Cash Register in America? Is it not strange that this son of Superstition and Trade can not find solace in the fact that in this Pix of Business is the Host of the Demiurgic Dollar? Indeed, the omnipresence and omnipotence of it are not without divine significance. For can you not see that this Cash Register, this Pix of Trade, is prominently set up on the altar of every institution, political, moral, social, and religious? Do you not meet with it everywhere, and foremost in the sanctuaries of the mind and the soul? In the Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge; in the Social Reform Propagandas; in the Don’t Worry Circles of Metaphysical Gymnasiums; in Alliances, Philanthropic, Educational; in the Board of Foreign Missions; in the Sacrarium of Vaticinatress Eddy; in the Church of God itself;––is not the Cash Register a divine symbol of the credo, the faith, or the idea?

What a guy. At that moment, a family emerged from overpriced lunch on Greenwich street and was turned around on its way to the memorial. They walked up Washington Street, the son trying to disappear inside his hooded sweatshirt, the mother with her short haircut hyperventilating from too much healthy walking, the daughter in shoes that lit up as she walked, another daughter texting, and the patriarch, with a symmetrical centered patch of hair protruding from his chin and pantaloons of denim tailored to end abruptly at the knee cap, and were set to intersect me as I continued.   

“To trade, or not to trade,” Hamlet-Khalid exclaims, “that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer, etc., or to take arms against the Cash Registers of America, and by opposing end––” What? Sacrilegious wretch, would you set your face against the divinity in the Holy Pix of Trade? And what will you end, and how will You end by it? An eternal problem, this, of opposing and ending. But before you set your face in earnest, we would ask you to consider if the vacancy or chaos which is sure to follow, be not more pernicious than what you would end. If you are sure it is not, go ahead, and we give you Godspeed. If you have the least doubt about it––but Khalid is incapable now of doubting anything. And whether he opposes his theory of immanent morality to the Cash Register, or to Democracy, or to the ruling powers of Flunkeydom, we hope He will end well. Such is the penalty of revolt against the dominating spirit of one’s people and ancestors, that only once in a generation is it attempted, and scarcely with much success.

  I had recited for the sake of the dragon, but as I finished the family was clapping for me. I looked down. The mother looked thrilled.

“Is that Shakespeare?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you reading Shakespeare?”

“Ha, no, actually it’s a twentieth century novel.” She wasn’t satisfied.

“Oh, I thought I heard something from Shakespeare in there.” She squeezed her husband’s arm.

“Ah yes, there is a reference to Hamlet in there.” I looked back a paragraph ““To trade, or not to trade,” Hamlet-Khalid exclaims, “that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer, etc., or to take arms against the Cash Registers of America, and by opposing end––””

“Halid?”

“Yeah, Khalid, he’s the narrator in the book, he’s complaining about consumerism. But he wasn’t just against that, he had a lot of beefs, he was pretty melancholy about everything.”

“Like you Tucker,” she said to her son laughing. Tucker spoke up.

“What’s the name of the book?”

“The Book of Khalid.”

“Sounds like a Klingon.”

“ Ha, no, he was from Lebanon, well, and from here.” I pointed up and down Washington Street.

The father was puzzled.

“How do you mean?”

“The character lived in the same neighborhood that the author did back at the turn of the century. This was an ethnic enclave of different Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Arab immigrants. You couldn’t really tell by looking at it.”

An old couple stopped in front of the church to see what we were all looking at. The man squinted through his glasses at St. George, who was busy with his dragon. Then they looked over at me thrashing my arms.

“No it wasn’t just in the book, I mean the book was based on a real neighborhood, umm, look, here...” I skimmed for geography in the pages.

“As here, here we go...One day he passes by a second-hand book-shop, which is in the financial hive of the city, hard by a church and within a stone’s throw from the Stock Exchange. So if I had to guess, I would say the church he’s referring to is Trinity Church right around the corner.” The older daughter looked utterly bored.

“Wow, that’s great.” The dad was excited. “You know, I’ve been reading this great history about Tammany Hall I brought on the trip, and they go into these really detailed descriptions of how the city looked back at the turn of the century, the trollies, the crooked politicians..”

“Ah yes, Ken is demanding we make it up to Union Square to see the original hall before we go.” She squeezed his arm again.  

“You know, I think Khalid attends works for Tammany hall during the book.” I dashed through the pages.

“Oh, here you go, this is great, a letter from one of the staff at Tammany Hall to Khalid:

“Dear Khalid:

“I have succeeded in getting Mr. O’Donohue to appoint you a canvasser of the Syrian District. You must stir yourself, therefore, and try to do some good work, among the Syrian voters, for Democracy’s Candidate this campaign. Here is a chance which, with a little hustling on your part, will materialise. And I see no reason why you should not try to cash your influence among your people. This is no mean position, mind you. And if you will come up to the Wigwam to-morrow, I’ll give you a few suggestions on the business of manipulating votes.

“Yours truly,

“Patrick Hoolihan.”

The old couple had joined us. The old man had a smile on his face. He pointed his finger in the air to get all of our attention, and then he begun to speak.

“You know, I remember, before they ran the tunnel through here, this area. I grew up over on Orchard and Division, you know a block away from Seward Park where the Forward building still stands to this day, the building along with two busts of, you’ll never guess, Mr. Friedrich Engels and Herr Karl Marx.”

“Get out of town!” I said.

“God’s honest truth, anyways, I remember these little Syrian boys used to come peddling up Allen street with their push carts, with all kinds of funny jingles, this was ages ago.” Three Europeans in sunglasses were listening in. “I would come over sometimes, I think one time my mother dragged me for a wedding, don’t remember whose it was for the life of me, but I do remember the reception, ach, how lovely, they had rented out the whole Sheik Restaurant...”

“You ate at the Sheik Restaurant?” My excitement was more than flattering. He raised his eyebrows and leaned in.

“Before your father was born.”

The father had a few questions for him. I nodded at the Europeans, and a Chinese man with a plastic bag watched us. The mother held her little daughter’s hand and asked me some more questions about the church, the neighborhood, and I asked about their vacation, and what else they were planning on seeing.

“Well, apparently now Little Syria.”

“I’m so glad I could be here for it.” The old man had led the father off up the street to show him some view of the Woolworth building and we had all unknowingly followed. I pointed out a place where there had been once been some Lebanese silk factories “you know, they used to be the biggest purveyors of Kimonos in the city back when they became a huge fad in the 1920’s.” The three kids were being drug cruelly along. Someone in the group of the sunglassed Europeans was looking through their guidebook trying to catch up with what the hell we were talking about. At Church and Liberty we picked up a few Koreans from a bus tour loitering outside the Burger Duke who asked me when the new tower would be finished.

I started walking backwards talking to the crowd about the intricate logic behind the ownership rights to the privately owned public park to their right as someone among the Koreans raised their hand.

“Excuse me, do you know where is the road that was Radio Row?”

“Ah yes, it doesn’t exist anymore, the street. I mean Radio Row is gone too, but even the street was stopped to make way for the original twin towers.”

He felt emboldened by everyone looking at him to make his next question a comment.

“You know, there is a place in Seoul that is like Radio Row, this is the  Yongsan Electronics Market.”

“Wow...well, that’s great.” He nodded that he agreed.

On speaking with the old man about Washington Street, he seemed to remember that it rejoined alongside Greenwich after the World Trade Center.

“Au contraire sir, the once proud artery of semitic commerce never reemerges.”

“I’ll bet you a buffalo nickel.”

“You have a deal.” The girl on her phone looked embarrassed for me. Her younger sister was begging their mom to let them get back on the double decker bus. Their father chimed in.

“You know, if we can get to the north of the construction site, I can probably show y’all how the building is set up to have a redundant steel moment frame.”  

the European man with the guidebook tapped me on the shoulder.

“Yes, we are trying to get to Prince Street...” I looked at his party. Devout pilgrims in search of discount wares to fill their old brand name holy pix. Unwavering in devotion to the pantheon, Louis the King, Prada the winged beast, and Gucci the Godhead. I sent them up Broadway. In exchange we got a dozen Boy Scouts and a pair of sweating Russians. The man of the bunch had a bald head dangerously close to obtaining a severe Yankee bronze.  

We took a left down Park Place and suddenly beyond the normal hubbub something else was taking place. This back street was filled. And with a sea of American flags. Never a good sign.  

 A crowd of angry rabble had been cordoned off on one side of  the street, waving their fists and screaming at a dusty closed down building, like villagers at the corpse of a giant. Tucker and his sisters immediately perked up, and were snapping pictures around the coddling arms of their mother. Everyone had signs, but most were scribbled haphazardly with sharpie. I couldn’t make any sense of it. The old man had no idea. Then a procession of five men in leather vests walked in front of everyone with matching signs. The word Sharia in blood letters. The person at the front created a bottleneck as he stopped to scream at someone whose sign said something about the 1st ammendment. He was joined in by a vicious women with a ponytail and ankle banglets. She tried to stuff her pointer finger into his face.

“Then get out of this country, this country doesn’t belong to you!!”

Behind them another group had placards that they tried to hoist higher over their heads. A man in a POW-MIA shirt cheered  the woman on.

“Get out of here you fucking lunatics.” He tucked his sign under his arm for a second to cup his mouth with his hands and yell louder.

“Loonies!”

His friends patted him on the back as he lifted his heavy sign back in the air.

DON’T GLORIFY MURDERS OF 3,000 NO 9/11 VICTORY MOSQUE

    I was a little wary to approach them, my eye only recently cleared of bruising, but curiosity got the best of me.

    “Hello, how are you guys doing?”

    “How are you doing? Have you heard about this disgraceful plan to build a mosque mere blocks away from ground zero?”

    “I have not.”

    “Well we’re here today trying to bring it to people’s attention. You know I had buddies in those towers on that day, lost a cousin. And to think a bunch of fucking Muslims want to parade on the graves of our heroes, well it makes me sick.”

    “It’s a victory mosque? What is a victory mosque?”

    “Well, they claim it’s going to be a culture center, but there will be a prayer room, I mean call it what you will, but it don’t belong here.”

“Belong where?”

“Buddy, you hear me, not in this city, not here in a place that stands for sacrifice in the face of Islamic fascism.”

“Well, there are plenty of Mosques already...”

“NOT NEAR GROUND ZERO.”

I was trying to count how many blocks Thunder Lingerie was from the site when he started shouting through me towards the building.”

“NO SHARIA LAW!!! DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION!!”

“Excuse me!”

“WHAT?”

“What exactly do you mean by Sharia law?”

    “You know, all of the stuff the Taliban does.”

“You mean Islamic law?”

“Yeah, where the hell have you been? I’m talking about where they cut off your hand if you steal an apple. Where women are made to wear fucking beekeeper suits. Where they stone adulterers. It’s religious fascism.”

    Fourteen hundred years of religious and legal history illustrated by a scene from a Disney movie and the F word. I guess everyone’s free to a little exaggeration, especially about Shari’a.

الجهل به غلط عظيم على الشريعة... فالشريعة عدل الله بين عباده ورحمته بين خلقه وظله في أرضه  وشفاؤه التام الذي به دواء كل عليل وطريقه المستقيم الذي من استقام عليه ...فهي الحياة والغذاء والدواء والنور والشفاء  وكل خير في الوجود فإنما هو مستفاد منها وحاصل بها وكل نقص في الوجود فسببه من إضاعتها ولولا رسوم قد بقيت لخربت الدنيا وطوي العالم وهي العصمة للناس وقوام العالم وبها يمسك الله السماوات والأرض أن تزولا فإذا أراد الله سبحانه وتعالى خراب الدنيا وطي العالم رفع إليه ما بقى من رسومها فالشريعة التي بعث الله بها رسوله هي عمود العالم وقطب الفلاح والسعادة في الدنيا والآخرة

“Which countries have those as laws?”

“Every Muslim country! Haven’t you been watching the news? Here take this flyer.”

“Creeping Sharia” is a phenomenon scourge occurring across the free world. We’ll define it as “the slow, deliberate, and methodical advance of Islamic law (sharia) in non-Muslim countries” (literal definitions below). Another frequently used term is ‘stealth jihad’.

To the general public, justifiably pre-occupied with work, family, pleasure, dreams, hopes, goals, and the stresses of each, “creeping sharia” goes mostly unnoticed. Until, that is, a particular event generates enough concern from those who focus on the “creep” that the general public takes notice. These singular events are sometimes less worrisome, but taken in whole, the uncoordinated yet explicit goal of the ummah and worldwide caliphate become obvious and alarming.

    “Thanks for the heads-up, you never know, I mean there could be people sympathetic to Muslims right here among us, and you’d never know it.”

    “you’re absolutely right.”

    “People so brainwashed by Shari’a that they would try to apologize for it, saying that its interpretation was historically or culturally contingent.”

“Right...”

“Do you believe that?”

“What?”

“Do you believe that Fiqh is historically or culturally contingent?”

“The fuck are you talking about boy?”

“Okay thanks!” I darted away. Sadly, in the ruckus my group was gone. It had  washed up against this violent sea and broken like a ship in a storm. Even the old man had vanished. I looked up at the empty building and once back over the crowd. Someone had someone else by the collar, punching him in the face.

I was off to find the location of the famous old palace of Arabic Cuisine, Baghdad Palace, on West 28th street. But for Khalid’s sake, who would certainly have winced to see his beloved district so overtaken by speechifying trash, I had one last quote.  

Better the ring of Al-Mutanabbi’s scimitars and spears than the clatter of these atheistical bones!.. These people, are not free thinkers, but free stinkards. They do need soap to wash their hearts and souls.