Where Am I?

Where  Am I?

I got little sleep those first two nights, and upon waking I actually heard myself ask, “Where am I?”

(After a detour owing to the Christian holy days, and too many days, it is time to get back to Tel Aviv, where I landed setting out from Grand Rapids 36 hours earlier).

“Where am I” is a very Buddhist question.  All forms of Buddhism teach that what we perceive is illusory, not reality.  Take me 7000 miles and 7 time zones away and I will experience exactly that.

Nothing feels quite real, including me.  Which is very Buddhist.  Not just that you are in a different place, you are different by being in that other world.  You are not who you think – or thought – you are.

All forms of Buddhism also teach relinquishment, letting go of what you think is so.  Travel does that, too, especially pilgrim journeys.  You are obliged to let go of the world where you live, for example, and to live with far less than when at home.  To travel is to relinquish.  And and if you hear a simile for mortality in that idea, that too is kinda perfect for a pilgrim.  Most pilgrim journeys are at some level about mortality.  Before I get in too deep with the Buddhist stuff, though, let me recommend James Ford’s blog also on Patheos, Monkey Mind.  That’s his rabbit hole, not mine.

My point is that feeling this way is kinda perfect for a pilgrim.  And a lot like my lost suitcase.

“I and my suitcase are One”

Actually not, as it is still missing after 36 hours in Tel Aviv, but ‘one’ in the way Matsuo Basho, who inspired my pilgrim hopes over 50 years ago, titled one of his travelogs, “Record of a Travel-Worn Satchel,” meaning himself.  That’s me and it, for in point of fact my suitcase – the lost one – really is travel worn.  The sides are scratched, the handles are fraying.  It is a Velveteen Rabbit of a satchel.

(Aside: you may remember that I talked about Matsuo Basho a few weeks back.  Reading his “Narrow Road to the Deep North planted the seed of pilgrim life back in 1971)

It was also still at large as I went to breakfast that second morning.  Today, I must go north to Haifa – with a visit to Caesarea in between – and my babka is less savory because my mind is wondering about that suitcase.  Yes, I have purchased some new clothes, but it also holds my walking stick which experience has taught me is a valued partner.  Thus I was glad, while nursing my third cafe americano, when an email came saying that my delayed bag had arrived on the same flight the next day.  It got as far as Tel Aviv!  Last time this happened it went to Munich when I went to Delhi.  But it was still at the airport and as I said, I am checking out this morning. 

Through an email exchange they promised to send it to Haifa, and having no other choice, I channeled Basho an let go of that.  Very Buddhist of me, but what other choice did I have?  Does it count if you have no choice but to do the Buddhist thing?

Following the advice of the hotel clerk, Google maps gave me directions to the train station, and I was out the door by 945 , following those directions to get to the bus that would deliver me to the train that would deliver me to the bus that would deliver me to the ruins.  

There are no trivialities in Pilgrim Life.

To situate the bus ride to the train station in Tel Aviv, I must tell you about a bus ride in Siena back in ‘01, when I was on sabbatical with my family.

After a fine visit to the immense unfinished cathedral with its zebra cladding, taking in the Paleo where the horse race takes place with all its flags and ceremony, and then a lunch where I ate wild board stew, it was time to leave.  Confidently I found the bus stop, hustled us on board after asking the driver with an Italian cock of my head, “stazione ferroviarria, si?”  He nodded, and I watched as we went down the hill, but went past the rail station and headed off into the Tuscan countryside.

Confused, and a little scared, I wish I could have enjoyed it more.  Not knowing where we would end up made us all a little uneasy.  We came to a church sitting out in a field where he stopped.  We were the only one on the bus besides the driver.  I got really worried.  We sat for a few minutes; then he turned around and started back.

Rather than being the next stop on his route, it turned out the station the last stop before going into the city.  So technically, yes, it was on his route, but really, he must have sensed we were not interested in a tour of the countryside.  But that was a more memorable day because of it.

You may have guessed by now that in Tel Aviv, as in Siena, I got on the right bus going the wrong way, which meant the driver pulled into a lot with other buses and gestured me to get out.  “Ha Shalom?” I said with a question mark, meaning the train station.  He pointed to a bus about to leave.  I got the message and then retraced the same route back to where I started from and then onward to the train station.  Instead of making the 930 train to Binyamina as planned, I was taking the 1100 train which got in at about 1200.  

Then the real adventure began.

You thought it already had, didn’t you?  But wait, Google then sent me to a bus stop that would take me to Caesarea National Park, but the sign on the bus stop told me the bus would not arrive for an hour.  Not caring to spend an hour baking in a sun filled bus stop (lacking hat and sunscreen because they were *ahem* in my suitcase) I looked at Google and found that the time to walk was only 20 minutes more than waiting for the bus.  Walking is always preferable, and so I did.

Now, I was in a suburb, built largely since independence.  Following Google’s suggested path had me walking on the shoulder of a four lane road much of the time.  Maps do not always tell you everything you want to know.  Past unremarkable streets and buildings, which could have been anywhere around the Mediterranean, reaching a crossroads with rather shabby looking auto repair places – tires and sheet metal casually deployed reminding me of Lima – then through a little park, into the village of Binyamina.  My iPhone was always ready to tell me where to go, if not always which side of the street was best. 

Noting the time, I checked the bus schedule (having walked along the actual route) and decided to wait for the next bus.  I compared my Google directions with the official bus route posted, decoding Hebrew by comparison with English.  Gan Leumi Kisiriah was on both lists!  Whew.

Such is the mental life of a solo traveler

Every day is a puzzle.  You piece things together like a murder mystery.  Knowing some Biblical Hebrew helped me in teasing out the words, but not much.  At least I could read the letters.  And the right bus did show up with a driver older than me, almost hunched over the wheel, but did deliver me to the Caesarea National Park, albeit almost 2 hours later than planned.  I will tell you about the place, but must first say that everything after all this is far less exciting.  The inevitable missteps are always more interesting than what you plan.

Everthing Old is New

At tourist sites, and Caesarea National Park is just that, consistency is the goal.  With many visitors from outside Israel, it helps that ticketing booths, food courts, shops, clean toilets, are similar wherever you go.  As with so many such places, you have to past the restaurants and snack bars before seeing the actual place, which is a port and city erected by Herod the Great (so called) in the last part of the last century BCE.  Not only was it notable in its time, the recovery of it has revealed a more extensive site than most, covering several acres.  I chose to go here because it is so extensive and complete.

The entry is through crusader fortifications, one of several occupying powers over the centuries.  Its walls are still in place.  Instantly,  the corpses of ancient columns, with capitals and bases separated, line the ancient road that leads into the ruins.   

Herod’s harbor has been rebuilt several times.  It was the largest arificial harbor on the Mediterranean when first built.  Massive in cost as well as size, a daunting because it meant building underwater.  Its jetties are now well diminished from when Herod built them.  What remains conveys some sense of what they once were.  Standing along one, the water strikingly blue, and I can see two snorklers bobbing about, their helpers in folding chairs near the edge.

Not only are the jetties shorter, much of the inner harbor has filled in.  The sea used to reach the parvis in front of ther temple of Augustus and Roma, which remains in place.  The platforms for the temples also remain, the space beneath its vaults used for the visitor cente.  There is a film that is rather hokey and spoken in Hebrew with bad dubbing.  That’s where I learned about political intrigue as much as the architecture.  I welcomed the shade and the seat.

There was a timeline of how the city was first built, then expanded, then dismantled or neglected, until Baron de Rothschild spent tons of money, ala Rockefeller on Williamsburg, recovering the place.  He and his descendents also invested, and still invest in, the current community as well.  

My Life In Ruins

The best parts were Herod’s palace, the theater and circus.   There was a vault used for a Mithraic temple, dozens of mosaics, a long circus with remains of its spina unearthed, and to my surprise, New Testament sites.  One was a marble plaque naming Pontius Pilate as the giver of a building, the other was the likely spot where Paul was interrogated and appealed to Caesar.  These stories exist outside of time, so to see a prosaic place with a small sign, is startling at first, rendering them more real and more small. 

It has been a decade since I was among ruins like these, back when I was clambering over stones in Iznik and Delfi.  Such places appeal to me, along the lines I read in a book about the sociological function of ruins, titled, unsurprisingly, “In Ruins.”  When asked why ruins are so appealing, I say that I appreciate anything older than me.  But it is far more, as Westwood and others have observed.  What exactly that is, this power of ruins, eludes even the best writers.  Henry James said, 

”the appeal seems ever to rise out of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble.”

And some time earlier Dickens found himself pondering the appeal of ruins, saying,

”the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.”

Both great observations, but hardly piercing.

Colliding with Consequence

I walk into the room (now a piazza) with a worn paved floor where Paul stood facing authority, and finding something tingly about crossing actual paths with one whose intense mind altered, even redefined, the cult of Jesus as Jewish messiah into a cosmology and religion.  He was imprisoned here for 2 years.  

Somewhere else I crossed paths with Origen, the Christian scholar, and Eusebius and Basil and Greogry Nazianzus and Jerome.  Did not see evidence of them.  Nor the notorious site of rabbi Akiva’s death, who was flayed alive for violating Roman interdicts.  One source says it was in the hippodrome through which I saw a bus load of Asian tourists walking.  It is among the most mythic moments of Jewish history.  The legend also says he died with the Shema on his lips.  

Coming to Israel I expect to see places hallowed by tradition and religion, indeed that is my purpose being here, but seldom do I think they will just turn up.  In Athens years ago I was nonplussed (is that the right word?) to find myself reading a sign casually saying this ruin was likely where Socrates drank the hemlock that killed him.  

Is Everything Holy Now?

At the Visitor’s center I saw a long case full of potsherds, many with writing and decoration that located their moment in the long history here, and illustrating how what began with Herod became Roman, then Byzantine, then Islamic, then Crusader, then Islamic again, each era crushing the past beneath it.  Everything we do is a sacrilege to something that came before. 

Standing amid hundreds of broken columns arranged in groups, presumably for reassembly at some point, I could see simultaneously shiny youth and shadowed age.  What was glorious and powerful once is bound to be ground into gravel for a subsequent time.  What was sacred to Augustus or Christ or Allah is as mortal as we are.  

Maybe that is what makes ruins powerful.  They are both young and old, sacred and profane, temporal and eternal.  

Nothing Gold Can Last

Frost’s poem applies to marble as well as flowers.  As I walked the expanse of ruins I literally cross paths more than once with a small Jewish family.  They are here to take Bar Mitzvah photos for their son who is dressed in a fine suit, sitting in poses directed by a photographer, the boy wearing jaunty sunglasses and looking very cool indeed.  Dad wears a kippah but no tallit qattan, and mom, hair dutifully but fashionably covered with a wrap that sits exactly between a veil and an African crown, pushes the stroller with the boy’s younger sibling.  Her dress goes below her knees of course, but her shoes are saucy black ankle boots.  

A clot of East Asian tourists entered the circus area, and in the theater a handful of Christian monks in black habits with gray scapulars are taking pictures.  Caesarea was intended as a world cross road and it still is, probably on a scale Herod never dreamed.  Paul stood here two millennia ago, and Richard the Lionheart a thousand years later, and neither knew the land in which I was born.  

To lift the weight of human history here I had to look out to the sea, not wine dark as Homer put it, but cobalt and as ageless as the ruins are aged, as fluid as the stone was hard.  Sitting in the shade of an all but empty bunch of tables outside a gelateria, swigging my $3 bottle of water while powering up my iPhone to lead me home, a bunch of starlings flitted about on the ground and the tables around me.  Used to us humans, perhaps seeing us as sources of food which we are when we leave crumbs about, they have no sense of our pretensions any more than the sea.  Like the sea, they bring no grand intention to their work, no aspirations of glory or ozymandian eternity.  Maybe we humans, when we live better, will move toward salvation or moksha or nirvana not by climbing ever higher but returning as little birds or a wave of the ocean.  

Past the nymphaeum I walk toward the exit by which I entered.  A man my age, white beard and kippah, looks at the same spot as I do.  Are our thoughts all that different?  Outside the park a Russian family waits with me for the bus, the two kids roughhousing in the brush around the bus shelter.  The bus arrives, and with a casual simplicity born of complicated experience, I note the stops as we go along, figuring out that the voice saying, “Hanatenah  Haba’ah,” means next stop, I make it to the train station readily, misusing my RavKav card again, but this time because they failed to inform us not me failing to understand, and ride north on a crowded train to Haifa.

The sun had not quite set when I left the train and walked the short way to the hostel.  Haifa is perched on a hill that drops into a natural harbor.  I can smell the sea as I walk.  After a shower and chat ‘with the missus’ I stroll some shops for supper, finding a lame excuse for a take out sandwich and a bottle of beer.  Ready to eat is not a thing here.  Leftover cookies from two nights ago made it almost a meal.  And not long after that my suitcase arrived, missing the carabiner that keeps the zippers zipped, but here.  Even the sunset over the sea was not as satisfying as getting that.  It has been with me for over 20 years now.  I am glad we are back together.