Birds of Marakesh

There are more birds outside.  We’ve only had chickadees and magpies, all winter.  The chickadee’s call is a pretty simple tweet.  The latter, the Magpie is an annoying shrill clacking like the close of a rusty shear.  But today, there is a richer dialogue of activity out there.  Some migratory feeders must be sweeping through on their way back north.  It is lovely to hear all the difference. 

Yesterday I had a quick Skype call with a friend.  I thought I knew where he was, in Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress.  He picked up the call and I heard the sound of coffee pouring.  And, there behind him I heard the calls of birds, which I didn’t recognize. Catalonian birds, I figured.  Then he told me, the conference had ended and he was over in Marrakesh.  In a flash, my remembrances of the Bari Gotic were swept aside, replaced by some exotic stock images of winding alleys in that city I had never seen.    The birds, however probably make their way fairly easily back and forth across Gibraltar. But not across Eurasia.  

My mind will be left for a while with Paddy Fermor in the east of Europe, along the Danube in Hungary somewhere. I usually doze right off at night but I was caught in a loop of late night lucidity and shared the time, most agreeably with that brilliant writer.  I’ve now finished “A Time of Gifts.”  I can’t remember enjoying anything quite so much in a while and I’ll be looking feverishly in the States for the sequel “Between the Trees and the Water,” I am sure, so we can continue on the way down to Istanbul. 

It’s an autobiographical account of his plodding across Europe on foot from Holland to Constantinople at the age of eighteen.  It is at one and the same time so immediate and familiar, while separated by time and the events of history to make it absolutely inaccessible.  Europe of the 1930s is gone, forever.  I wonder if my daughters would enjoy it, would feel camaraderie with this young man or if his freedom of movement, lack of planning and preparedness would create a different gulf between them and what is surely a “boys” tale.  Ultimately, he writes so well, I don’t think it would matter.

Making our way down to the Black Sea I suppose he will bump into the Crimea in this next book.  Cold, hard news this morning, no?  A bit of a flashback to the Cold War, binary limits of the world when I was Paddy Fermor’s age and there was still a Soviet Union.  Russia has moved to secure the Crimea.  The have take the airports, the seaports, the administrative buildings, all in cars, and uniforms unmarked.  The Ukrainians in the western part of the country must suddenly be very nervous.   Obama’s obligatory warning, ignored, as expected.  Russian relations with the US and the west, set back once again to familiar opposition.  All efforts to 化敌为友[1] seem fated to fail.

I don’t know if they were planted there in Sebastopol but apparently there were people chanting “USA Go Home!”  Other than a few C.I.A. scurrying about, I didn’t assume we had much of anything besides a rhetorical presence in the Crimea.  These Russian plans for annexation were drawn up many years ago.  How convenient that the Olympics have passed, just last week.  Looked at purely demographically the Ukraine does look like two countries with Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east and south.  Are we to have this enormous nation formally divided then or will Russia continue to push until all of the Ukraine is back under its influence? 

I know what it looks like from the U.S.  When Russian tanks move westward, it is the precursor for the war the U.S. stood ready to fight for fifty years.  I can only imagine what it looks like, sitting in Estonia, or Poland, or even Germany.  Is it all dismissed?  Surely Russian interests in the Crimea go back for centuries and it could be legitimately understood as “Russian” in a way that Poland never could.  The Baltics, however, may feel differently. 

My host country’s official position is that one shouldn’t interfere in another country’s internal affairs.  They would have been right to criticize the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  In this case, however, they are, like the old ladies protesting in Sebastopol, likely to find fault with the U.S. than Russia, who are merely doing what China would have to do were “autonomous” regions like Xinjiang or Tibet, ever to exercise too much autonomy.  I’ll be on a plane tomorrow and will have a look at the China Daily editorials on this.  I’m sure it will all be America’s fault.

Lester Bowie seems to speak these bird's language.  Shrill and then sweet.  Sharp, assertive and then forgiving, dashing off.  Born in Maryland in 1941, I hadn’t realized he’d played blues with the great Texas bluesman Albert King.  I hadn’t known he’d recorded in both Jamaica and Nigeria, the latter session with Fela Kuti on a song I’ve heard a hundred times, “No Agreement”. I did know about the Art Ensemble of Chicago and his deep inroads into popular music and of his dismissal of Wynton Marsalis conservatism.  And I hadn’t realized that all he’d accomplished was back in the last century, having passed in 1999, at the age of 58, there in Brooklyn.  
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/11/arts/lester-bowie-is-dead-at-58-innovative-jazz-trumpeter.html

I’ve got an album called “The 5^th Power” on now that was recorded in 1978 when he and his band mates, the only one of whom I recognize being the alto player Arthur Blythe, (more avenues for discovery!) were making their way across Europe on a concert tour.  I have no idea what cities they played but I will leave you and him with the notion that he may have crossed tracks a few times with Paddy Fermor’s pathway, playing Munich or Vienna perhaps.   Unable to go on to Budapest or Bratislava to play in 1978.  Two different epochs, central Europe in 1934, and 1978, both of which are gone now.  How long before this period too, changes forever?

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[1] huàdíwéiyǒu:  to convert an enemy into a friend (idiom)