This report is taken from PN Review 85, Volume 18 Number 5, May - June 1992.
The Turkish Rooftops
Turkish country people like to sleep on rooftops. In bowers made of dry leaves or in nests of reed they can be found sleeping in the night or during the day. Village houses have one ground floor where in rooms framed by divans families gather, having first taken off their shoes, on or around rugs of many colours, as close as possible to their earth. On the flat rooftops they sleep as close as possible to their sky. Inside the house, they take shelter. But their resourcefulness, generally, is epitomized in the way they ply, without fuss, between the interior and the exposed aspects of the house. Upon the Euclidian geometry of the house - a cellular cube with a flat lid - is mounted another, unstable geometry in which volumes of whatever description fold like breaths alternately in and out. For all the clutter to be found on it, the rooftop signifies The Uncontainable - τo 'Aξωρ&eeacgr;τoν - as if the purpose of bodies might be to pick away the contradiction, opaque or luminous, of their skin, thus to be unhoused.
Or is it the purpose of bodies to lean so far out that they can read what is inscribed upon their skin? For on almost any country rooftop the bower is ringed, the surface checkered, by variously significant utensils. Turkish country people like to have their tools and the products of their labour arrayed around them, even in sleep. Also laundry hangs there, drying. In pots of earthenware or tin there will be flowers growing; on trumpet vines flowers of startling blue open at first light, close again in the baking heat of noon, open again if ever the onset of night cools the air. The flowers are sprinkled early and later with water from hosepipes that Turkish people flourish at all hours to settle the dust. On the rooftops, too, there is dust. It has to be hosed away, every so often. Every so often, no less, a cat has to be frightened away, with a shout and a stamping foot. Not so the singular immobile objects. What is this assemblage of zinc barrels, two or three, supported by a metal frame? What is this tangle of rods? On a neighbouring rooftop, across the dusty potholed street, can that actually be the driver's cabin of a delivery truck? That curly object on yet another roof is definitely a tuba, for many years unburnished, left behind by a passing army. And even further off, between this rooftop and the distant temple, you can identify the fresher ruins of a sewing machine.
History has swept across the Turkish rooftops all too often. Utensils live their life still uncongealed; certain other objects, not yet dust, are not really debris but relics, relics jettisoned by hordes on horseback, Macedonian footsloggers, Hittite infantry, and a dull glow still envelops them, forgotten though their origin and use may now be. Soon it may even be forgotten that this miniature Byzantine cathedral, with its towers and cupolas, was borne from street to street on the back of a man who for a coin or two dispensed cups of water from it.
A staircase ascends to the rooftop. It is attached to an outside wall. The stairs are of brick, whitewashed, not very wide, often in fact quite narrow, so that if two people were to meet near the top, one going up and the other down, one of those two people would have to flatten himself against the wall and take a deep breath, or the other might topple off the outer edge and crash through the vine trellis that overshadows a small patio below. (Overshadows, but there is more to it: as summer advances, the grapes fatten in their clusters, innumerable silhouettes of leaf, grape, bird or branch of lemon tree engulf the patio and disperse intricate mobile designs across its floor.) In any event, there is no handrail on the outside edge of the staircase. Seldom will you find two Turkish people, either, flattening themselves against the wall or plunging side by side through the trellis. There is a code and the code is observed. Ascent or descent is accomplished without hurry by one Turkish person at a time.
Buckets, parts of cooking stoves, donkey saddles, lengths of rope, piping, sinks, scythes - if you were to survey, on foot or with a telescope, the rooftops of an entire village, you would find a certain constant mass of more or less identical objects, but also a fringe of original and unique objects. The presence of the latter must signify, surely, this or that degree of variance from the norm to which this or that rooftop denizen has risen by dint of enterprise. Not every rooftop has in its repertory of objects a tangle of rods, a paraffin lamp, or a potted oleander. But in very hot villages the bower is a constant. It will be so situated that the least breeze makes the leaves rustle or reeds whisper. Every bower will rustle in the least breeze, so keen is the bower constructor's perception of the sky, so precise the attunement of his imagination to the sky's whims.
The assemblage of barrels mounted on one another in their frame is a water supply. Heated by the sun, the water gushes down (either on the roof or after passing through a pipe into the interior of the house) for a body to be washed; usually the intimacy of the interior is preferred, except by the rudest of travellers who have been welcomed, guests on the rooftop. Nobody can remember what the tangle of rods is, but still it has its place up here, perhaps merely as a ghostly presence to be stepped around. Or else it is a sky trap. When you wake up among the trumpet vines you might find a piece of the sky, nocturnal animal, snared in it, still groaning, shuddering a bit. Perhaps that is what my grandfather found. Why else would he have refused one day to strap his Byzantine water cathedral to his back and the next gone off to Izmir in search of a ship?
Remember how, in Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte Victoire, the mountain changes its clothes, sky its diagonals that shine or rain down upon the roof of the mountain. Dense oil or transparent watercolour, the picture itself is this threshold of contact between orders of objects, present as rock, represented in the picturing act as liquid, remember. Well, every bower envelops a low platform made of wood. A thin mattress is laid over the wood. Over the mattress is laid a woven rug, and cushions are placed for the sleeper's head to rest on; perhaps a thin, if not threadbare, blanket will also be there. A thin blanket, brown or gray. A threadbare blanket. Dust billows out when you shake it. A blanket.
Optimally there will be a mosquito net. A delicate white cocoon, folded back by day its flaps are released at night and secured by strings. Probably many Turkish babies have been conceived on rooftops; tired women refresh themselves in these bowers; in their nests old men look up at the moon and recover hope.
On some Turkish rooftops you will see oblongs of concrete from which steel rods stick out, some askew, some perpendicular. The oblongs are positioned symmetrically, but the rods go every which way, and some do say they are an eyesore. Why are they there? Is it to anchor a new storey eventually to be built over the rooftop, so that the enclosure of any one present rooftop will lead to the unfolding of another, higher up, even closer to the sky, even cooler than the one the new stor.ey will have enclosed, and so up and up, like a squared ziggurat? Some say the new storey will never be written, I mean built, but that Turkish people cling so fondly to their idea that nothing can ever be finished, nothing achieved, that they leave the oblongs there, with rods sticking out, to remind them always that life is impermanent, it is improvised, therefore they imagine rather than complete the upward extension, so the oblongs of concrete are ritual supports, not for new rooms but for ancient and compulsive imaginings, the forgotten past has its ruses, mischief in the air, now where was I? Others again say that if an addition is evid.ently projected but not yet finished you avoid paying tax. Even the last explanation achnits a principle. It is a principle pervading many features of life on Turkish rooftops: let every matter lie open, the boiling stuff of existence stays greener if no lid is put on it, earth calls to its lover the sky, sky calls back to earth, the transparency of a few dashes of intense blue or peach in a watercolour mountain may tomorrow condense into an oil colour so richly glowing that the mountain, tutored by the painter, in whose visions at first light, torrential but caught behind closed eyelids and configuring of their own accord, rock was turned into air, is shipped on its way apparently to Mohammad.
From such a rooftop you hear many voices. Night or day, human voices, animal voices. A rooster is crowing. Chickens thoughtfully cluck. A donkey brays. The little owl chants its one and only note, sometimes trilling it. Frogs instruct the stars to relax, relax. Out of nowhere a momentary song has floated into and out of the mouth of a girl in the street below. Or the timber trucks thunder by, the minaret emits a gravelly voice, that of an ill-tempered old man, Allah Allah, enrage'd to have been woken up, he is reaching for"his sword, Akbar.
Toward nightfall, listen for the drum. An old drum is being thumped among the huts, under the eucalyptus trees, a clarinet has joined it, playing a wiry tune, spiral, to the monotonous beat of the drum it adds a melody, a catch.
Somewhere down there, people are streaming toward the huts, in serious clothes, wizards in peaked caps, young men with fresh haircuts. Always the drumbeat, still the clarinet's catch. With or without your telescope - if with it, then be sure to wipe the oil or watercolour off its lens - you see the drummer, a brown old village man, made of olive wood, and the stick in his fingers never misses a single beat of the three it is capable of. The clarinet player is young, his lungs sepia with nicotine, but he is blowing without letup, the catch is attractive. Duly the crowd is ushered through a gap in the fence just before the Pepsi sign. People push through, the drummer will drum for them, the clarinetist blow for them long after all have settled in their ring around the dance floor. There, another music, more densely enormous, has now begun, and the wedding feast explodes, women dancing first, soon joined by uncles and fathers, finally by capering young men with arms outspread.
By this time you are with them, but as you spread your own arms look back to your rooftop. Hearing in contradiction the two musics, one dense, one transparent, you now conceive of the rooftop not as their analogue but as yet another threshold, altogether distinct, at which resemblances vanish, vanishing points of brilliant green and cool rose converge on the breathlike peril of substance, the deep ground of their volatility: a platform shrouded by leaves dried ochre by the air.
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON
Or is it the purpose of bodies to lean so far out that they can read what is inscribed upon their skin? For on almost any country rooftop the bower is ringed, the surface checkered, by variously significant utensils. Turkish country people like to have their tools and the products of their labour arrayed around them, even in sleep. Also laundry hangs there, drying. In pots of earthenware or tin there will be flowers growing; on trumpet vines flowers of startling blue open at first light, close again in the baking heat of noon, open again if ever the onset of night cools the air. The flowers are sprinkled early and later with water from hosepipes that Turkish people flourish at all hours to settle the dust. On the rooftops, too, there is dust. It has to be hosed away, every so often. Every so often, no less, a cat has to be frightened away, with a shout and a stamping foot. Not so the singular immobile objects. What is this assemblage of zinc barrels, two or three, supported by a metal frame? What is this tangle of rods? On a neighbouring rooftop, across the dusty potholed street, can that actually be the driver's cabin of a delivery truck? That curly object on yet another roof is definitely a tuba, for many years unburnished, left behind by a passing army. And even further off, between this rooftop and the distant temple, you can identify the fresher ruins of a sewing machine.
History has swept across the Turkish rooftops all too often. Utensils live their life still uncongealed; certain other objects, not yet dust, are not really debris but relics, relics jettisoned by hordes on horseback, Macedonian footsloggers, Hittite infantry, and a dull glow still envelops them, forgotten though their origin and use may now be. Soon it may even be forgotten that this miniature Byzantine cathedral, with its towers and cupolas, was borne from street to street on the back of a man who for a coin or two dispensed cups of water from it.
A staircase ascends to the rooftop. It is attached to an outside wall. The stairs are of brick, whitewashed, not very wide, often in fact quite narrow, so that if two people were to meet near the top, one going up and the other down, one of those two people would have to flatten himself against the wall and take a deep breath, or the other might topple off the outer edge and crash through the vine trellis that overshadows a small patio below. (Overshadows, but there is more to it: as summer advances, the grapes fatten in their clusters, innumerable silhouettes of leaf, grape, bird or branch of lemon tree engulf the patio and disperse intricate mobile designs across its floor.) In any event, there is no handrail on the outside edge of the staircase. Seldom will you find two Turkish people, either, flattening themselves against the wall or plunging side by side through the trellis. There is a code and the code is observed. Ascent or descent is accomplished without hurry by one Turkish person at a time.
Buckets, parts of cooking stoves, donkey saddles, lengths of rope, piping, sinks, scythes - if you were to survey, on foot or with a telescope, the rooftops of an entire village, you would find a certain constant mass of more or less identical objects, but also a fringe of original and unique objects. The presence of the latter must signify, surely, this or that degree of variance from the norm to which this or that rooftop denizen has risen by dint of enterprise. Not every rooftop has in its repertory of objects a tangle of rods, a paraffin lamp, or a potted oleander. But in very hot villages the bower is a constant. It will be so situated that the least breeze makes the leaves rustle or reeds whisper. Every bower will rustle in the least breeze, so keen is the bower constructor's perception of the sky, so precise the attunement of his imagination to the sky's whims.
The assemblage of barrels mounted on one another in their frame is a water supply. Heated by the sun, the water gushes down (either on the roof or after passing through a pipe into the interior of the house) for a body to be washed; usually the intimacy of the interior is preferred, except by the rudest of travellers who have been welcomed, guests on the rooftop. Nobody can remember what the tangle of rods is, but still it has its place up here, perhaps merely as a ghostly presence to be stepped around. Or else it is a sky trap. When you wake up among the trumpet vines you might find a piece of the sky, nocturnal animal, snared in it, still groaning, shuddering a bit. Perhaps that is what my grandfather found. Why else would he have refused one day to strap his Byzantine water cathedral to his back and the next gone off to Izmir in search of a ship?
Remember how, in Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte Victoire, the mountain changes its clothes, sky its diagonals that shine or rain down upon the roof of the mountain. Dense oil or transparent watercolour, the picture itself is this threshold of contact between orders of objects, present as rock, represented in the picturing act as liquid, remember. Well, every bower envelops a low platform made of wood. A thin mattress is laid over the wood. Over the mattress is laid a woven rug, and cushions are placed for the sleeper's head to rest on; perhaps a thin, if not threadbare, blanket will also be there. A thin blanket, brown or gray. A threadbare blanket. Dust billows out when you shake it. A blanket.
Optimally there will be a mosquito net. A delicate white cocoon, folded back by day its flaps are released at night and secured by strings. Probably many Turkish babies have been conceived on rooftops; tired women refresh themselves in these bowers; in their nests old men look up at the moon and recover hope.
On some Turkish rooftops you will see oblongs of concrete from which steel rods stick out, some askew, some perpendicular. The oblongs are positioned symmetrically, but the rods go every which way, and some do say they are an eyesore. Why are they there? Is it to anchor a new storey eventually to be built over the rooftop, so that the enclosure of any one present rooftop will lead to the unfolding of another, higher up, even closer to the sky, even cooler than the one the new stor.ey will have enclosed, and so up and up, like a squared ziggurat? Some say the new storey will never be written, I mean built, but that Turkish people cling so fondly to their idea that nothing can ever be finished, nothing achieved, that they leave the oblongs there, with rods sticking out, to remind them always that life is impermanent, it is improvised, therefore they imagine rather than complete the upward extension, so the oblongs of concrete are ritual supports, not for new rooms but for ancient and compulsive imaginings, the forgotten past has its ruses, mischief in the air, now where was I? Others again say that if an addition is evid.ently projected but not yet finished you avoid paying tax. Even the last explanation achnits a principle. It is a principle pervading many features of life on Turkish rooftops: let every matter lie open, the boiling stuff of existence stays greener if no lid is put on it, earth calls to its lover the sky, sky calls back to earth, the transparency of a few dashes of intense blue or peach in a watercolour mountain may tomorrow condense into an oil colour so richly glowing that the mountain, tutored by the painter, in whose visions at first light, torrential but caught behind closed eyelids and configuring of their own accord, rock was turned into air, is shipped on its way apparently to Mohammad.
From such a rooftop you hear many voices. Night or day, human voices, animal voices. A rooster is crowing. Chickens thoughtfully cluck. A donkey brays. The little owl chants its one and only note, sometimes trilling it. Frogs instruct the stars to relax, relax. Out of nowhere a momentary song has floated into and out of the mouth of a girl in the street below. Or the timber trucks thunder by, the minaret emits a gravelly voice, that of an ill-tempered old man, Allah Allah, enrage'd to have been woken up, he is reaching for"his sword, Akbar.
Toward nightfall, listen for the drum. An old drum is being thumped among the huts, under the eucalyptus trees, a clarinet has joined it, playing a wiry tune, spiral, to the monotonous beat of the drum it adds a melody, a catch.
Somewhere down there, people are streaming toward the huts, in serious clothes, wizards in peaked caps, young men with fresh haircuts. Always the drumbeat, still the clarinet's catch. With or without your telescope - if with it, then be sure to wipe the oil or watercolour off its lens - you see the drummer, a brown old village man, made of olive wood, and the stick in his fingers never misses a single beat of the three it is capable of. The clarinet player is young, his lungs sepia with nicotine, but he is blowing without letup, the catch is attractive. Duly the crowd is ushered through a gap in the fence just before the Pepsi sign. People push through, the drummer will drum for them, the clarinetist blow for them long after all have settled in their ring around the dance floor. There, another music, more densely enormous, has now begun, and the wedding feast explodes, women dancing first, soon joined by uncles and fathers, finally by capering young men with arms outspread.
By this time you are with them, but as you spread your own arms look back to your rooftop. Hearing in contradiction the two musics, one dense, one transparent, you now conceive of the rooftop not as their analogue but as yet another threshold, altogether distinct, at which resemblances vanish, vanishing points of brilliant green and cool rose converge on the breathlike peril of substance, the deep ground of their volatility: a platform shrouded by leaves dried ochre by the air.
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON
This report is taken from PN Review 85, Volume 18 Number 5, May - June 1992.