On 18 October 2009 I wrote (but didn’t share):
When I first came here everything had to happen post haste: get an apartment, get a phone, open a bank account, start projects, learn Arabic, get back in touch with people I’d known here before, even long ago.
Now it is six weeks into the adventure. We’ve been to Lebanon. I’ve been back to the States. This weekend we go to Syria. We have our apartment. We both have phones. The bankcard works as a debit at the supermarket and at other bank ATMs with no extra fees, the Arabic teacher comes twice a week. And I’ve got projects underway.
But I haven’t tracked down Kifah Fakhouri, director of the National Conservatory of Music still, who was featured in “Classical Caravan” of 1989. I haven’t brought a copy of the film to the Queen Noor al Hussein Foundation, headquartered just a few blocks from our apartment – but not so close as to hear the ducks spat. I’ve not reconnected with Basma or Thair, contacts from the State Department tour of ‘07 and Whetstone Productions training program of 2008 respectively.
I’m lulled into living as if there were plenty of time for all to be completed.
And on 20 December 2009 I begin by writing:
Even as I exult in the slower pace of life I notice that the To-Do list is longer than the Things-Done list. I never wrote you about Damascus except to say it was magic and mystery, befitting imagination. Or Petra. Or Eid al Adha and how it was and was not meaningful to have the Eid and Thanksgiving occur together. Or to point you to Salam al Marayati’s powerful piece, “Fort Hood: A Defining Moment for Muslim Americans,” November 13, 2009. Salam heads the Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC, and is one of the brightest and best thinkers we’ve got. He reminds me a bit of my dad. Keep an ear out for him.
Two months from that earlier musing I have found more people who know Kifah Fakhouri and I have still not reached out.
I have reconnected with Basma thanks to her setting up an event at Jordan University’s “American Corner” – a screening of “Inside Mecca” in early December where I lunched with professors from the American Studies and En
glish Literature departments who taught me something about both subjects. I never took an English lit class after high school! All the literature I studied was in Spanish. So here I am in Jordan, learning from native Arabic speakers something about Faulkner and Hemingway.
And there are extra fees attached to using our bankcard at other banks. They just don’t list the fees on the receipt; they show up on the statements, instead.
Petra was and Petra is a movie set extraordinaire. Standing atop the ledge of the Urn Tomb, where I stood with a group of Princeton Symphony musicians and my crew in 1988, and looking out over the valley, I saw either total fantasy or a revival of what Nabatean commerce may have resembled several thousand years ago. Did you know that Petra is the site of the first Neolithic human settlements? That people settled here about 2000 years before Stone Age settlements in Europe?
They’re literally “digging” into that now at Petra and a new area should be open to the public by the end of 2010.
It looks like I’ll be among the first videographers to capture it, too.
Katie and I went with Dr. Fadi Haddad, who we met at Thanksgiving and who is a founding member of the Royal Society of Photography. He got permission to drive into the site through the back entrance, through the village to which the inhabitants of Petra were transferred in the 1990s – to give them a better quality of life, and to keep the site protected from cooking, goats, unregulated commerce (sales and begging), and for greater antiquity preservation. The people still work Petra and come down the long, winding back road every day, adults and children, ready to lead tourists on their burros, horses and camels, to sell handmade jewelry and make (and sell) hot tea. We had a divine cup of tea at the farthest lookout point, on beyond the Dyer (Monastery) that’s the famous 900 steps climb from the floor of the Petra site to the top of the rose colored rock. From that promontory, on a clear day, you can see the Negev – according to the sign. It was not that clear when Katie and I climbed. But the tea was hot and sweet and we could squeeze our eyes and at least imagine the Wadi Rum off in the distance. Back home that night we watched “Lawrence of Arabia.”
So what to do about the pace and lack thereof? Write shorter. Edit faster. Make more phone calls. Ease up.
“There are no answers, only choices,” was a line from George Clooney’s “Solaris.” A weak movie with a memorable line and that handsome face.
Or how about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s comment to the Valdai International Discussion Club, that “setting unambitious goals is a waste of time”? www.cdi.org/Russia/johnson/2009-172-22.cfm
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