Leo Skála ---- https://www.soundinglines.com
The Sights of my I: A Citytriptych
TANGIER
The Illusion of Tangier is a fine thing to behold and be seduced by at first. You know you are dreaming when you enter Tangier. You're both in on the secret. There is a line where reality is and you know where it is. Clearly. This is all wonderful, and goes on for some time in indolent and spontaneous pleasure...and then the veil is ripped from your eyes. You lose track of the lines. They expand outward in radiating circles encompassing further realities you dimly suspected yet weren't sure of. The tides wash in and out with you as their plaything. The uncertainty of every hour’s possibility preys upon your mind. You are treated like royalty, like a prince, and a moment later you’ve become a pauper holding an armful of useless trinkets. Just when you believe you’re about to lose your footing for good, all uncertainty is annihilated into love. A glorious city. A city of rapture. One that inadvertently became my home, for a time. Everything is there, nothing is lacking...yet some essential part of its nature demands it remains a crooked and distorted island. Or else, I have yet to see it clearly. I do know there is an immense and strange tranquility in the place. A peace. Even amidst the casual streetbrawls and knifeviolences… especially amidst these. Tanja. Tinghis. Tanger. Tangier. Tangiers. Omniscient creature of the unexpected, the invisible, the wildly unpredictable. There are many cities filled with the octopus of commerce, politics, faith, hopes, creeds, banalities, mathematics and organic, irrational visions, but once a particular city inhabits you and you inhabit it a streak of pure magic comes in to transmute your life. As with a person you love, their voice, their memories, private wonders and peculiar ways of movement live inside you. Forever. The cities that have been built in every corner of the globe are a multitude, yet Tangier is the only city to contain them all for she is the one who contains multitudes.
ISTANBUL
Is this what they meant, all those pious ones with a heart, the scholars and saints, the infidels, imams, heathens, pagans, true priests and Sufis when they said ' the road to the Divine is that which is walked with Awe'? I drink a bottle of red wine on the shores of Anatolia by the Bosporus, and pour a few drops into your streams -- it isn't for me to know which Ocean they'll journey to. I could stretch my hands across this body of water and touch 'Western Soil', I could run my hands through the spices and tangled lace of your bazaars to find crystallized gnosis, living chrysalis, warnings, welcomes. I know there are more worlds living here than I could ever hope to understand, or encompass in these words. I know your neighborhoods are a set of pearls strung together on a necklace of continents. That you are an Eternal Being. A Flowering One. A multi-port city anchored in becoming and transience and belonging to no single man, woman or culture yet inviting them all to sprawl out on your fertile bed. You precious, sacred whore. You give and you give and you take and you take and the only account you keep is an arcane ledger which even the cobblers and stonemasons understand how to read. The history books pretend like they know how to inscribe you into their ethos. The myths all lay groaning on your wharfs, like dumb, struck fish glittering fantastically in the afternoon sunlight. The poems are better described by your spires stretching into the horizon’s sky, by the murmur and shouts of the populace, by the purr of streetcats, by the music in every alleyway asking not only God, but you, yes you, immediately: are you walking your personal road to Awe?
PARIS
(a spontaneous piece of poeticprose written on a typewriter while busking)
How many years have you sunk into the body of your cobblestoned streets and spent them casually, like a loose gambler with a sharp eye at a horsetrack, like a vendor of freshcut flowers, like an easy walk along the banks of the river Seine? Paris, I know what they say about you but I spend my evenings in silence so that I may know what you say about you; what secrets you keep, which audacities you indulge in, what your private intimacies do when no one else is listening, what you whisper to all the citizens who walk your streets and have loved in your hallways of light and the lineage of your story…Paris…
The Illusion of Tangier is a fine thing to behold and be seduced by at first. You know you are dreaming when you enter Tangier. You're both in on the secret. There is a line where reality is and you know where it is. Clearly. This is all wonderful, and goes on for some time in indolent and spontaneous pleasure...and then the veil is ripped from your eyes. You lose track of the lines. They expand outward in radiating circles encompassing further realities you dimly suspected yet weren't sure of. The tides wash in and out with you as their plaything. The uncertainty of every hour’s possibility preys upon your mind. You are treated like royalty, like a prince, and a moment later you’ve become a pauper holding an armful of useless trinkets. Just when you believe you’re about to lose your footing for good, all uncertainty is annihilated into love. A glorious city. A city of rapture. One that inadvertently became my home, for a time. Everything is there, nothing is lacking...yet some essential part of its nature demands it remains a crooked and distorted island. Or else, I have yet to see it clearly. I do know there is an immense and strange tranquility in the place. A peace. Even amidst the casual streetbrawls and knifeviolences… especially amidst these. Tanja. Tinghis. Tanger. Tangier. Tangiers. Omniscient creature of the unexpected, the invisible, the wildly unpredictable. There are many cities filled with the octopus of commerce, politics, faith, hopes, creeds, banalities, mathematics and organic, irrational visions, but once a particular city inhabits you and you inhabit it a streak of pure magic comes in to transmute your life. As with a person you love, their voice, their memories, private wonders and peculiar ways of movement live inside you. Forever. The cities that have been built in every corner of the globe are a multitude, yet Tangier is the only city to contain them all for she is the one who contains multitudes.
ISTANBUL
Is this what they meant, all those pious ones with a heart, the scholars and saints, the infidels, imams, heathens, pagans, true priests and Sufis when they said ' the road to the Divine is that which is walked with Awe'? I drink a bottle of red wine on the shores of Anatolia by the Bosporus, and pour a few drops into your streams -- it isn't for me to know which Ocean they'll journey to. I could stretch my hands across this body of water and touch 'Western Soil', I could run my hands through the spices and tangled lace of your bazaars to find crystallized gnosis, living chrysalis, warnings, welcomes. I know there are more worlds living here than I could ever hope to understand, or encompass in these words. I know your neighborhoods are a set of pearls strung together on a necklace of continents. That you are an Eternal Being. A Flowering One. A multi-port city anchored in becoming and transience and belonging to no single man, woman or culture yet inviting them all to sprawl out on your fertile bed. You precious, sacred whore. You give and you give and you take and you take and the only account you keep is an arcane ledger which even the cobblers and stonemasons understand how to read. The history books pretend like they know how to inscribe you into their ethos. The myths all lay groaning on your wharfs, like dumb, struck fish glittering fantastically in the afternoon sunlight. The poems are better described by your spires stretching into the horizon’s sky, by the murmur and shouts of the populace, by the purr of streetcats, by the music in every alleyway asking not only God, but you, yes you, immediately: are you walking your personal road to Awe?
PARIS
(a spontaneous piece of poeticprose written on a typewriter while busking)
How many years have you sunk into the body of your cobblestoned streets and spent them casually, like a loose gambler with a sharp eye at a horsetrack, like a vendor of freshcut flowers, like an easy walk along the banks of the river Seine? Paris, I know what they say about you but I spend my evenings in silence so that I may know what you say about you; what secrets you keep, which audacities you indulge in, what your private intimacies do when no one else is listening, what you whisper to all the citizens who walk your streets and have loved in your hallways of light and the lineage of your story…Paris…
