Day 4 – September 4 2024 – İstanbul: Topkapı Palace & Istanbul Modern, Sanat Müzesi

To Sultanahmet. The Palace. Pass the sleeping dog and the four crows.

Pay the exorbitant fee. Request audioguide. When asked for passports as deposit, gracefully withdraw.  And enter, avoiding the water cannon.

In the first garden you will find bric-a-brac. Ignore. Admire certain symmetries.

Find the amenities at your convenience and proceed.

A tissue should be sufficient to clean the garden ornament, supposedly Byzantine.

Do not awaken it from its slumber.

Avoid crowds who gather at popular sites and visit the regions of the palace more suited to your status. Here, the pet rat.

Look for adequate hiding-places among the food-storage chests and urns.

Pay special attention to the sultan’s entertainment.

Marvel at the jewels encrusting even the most upside-down of bowls.

And that early mistake which became by flattering it with repetition a calligraphic convention of the court.

Flattery to point of caricature.

Do not be tempted to put the giant food cosy on your head.

Enlist expert assistance at the pots.

Prepare the pastry on the pastry slab for the delicious filling Yunus is making.

And grind gems and spices.

Here.

And decant the sherbert.

Wonder at the felicity of the white eunuchs.

Triadic polka dots today?

With the protoplasmic leggings?

Unsure? Take three of everything.

Your hands may be hidden as others will be performing the tasks of your hands. In emergencies, use the arm slits provided.

Consult if unsure of the meaning of a pattern.

In winter, patterns inside.

And tickly tails.

An undershirt to help you with tricky astrological calculations.

Read the fine print.

You will surprise the future.

Ignore the tiles.

Record the gesture.

Absorb the effulgence.

The beneficent apparatus.

Be not casual.

Study.

And marvel.

Strike fear but be just in the use of violence (not: violent in the use of justice).

What avails it one to keep the holy cardigan in this golden chest?

And bask again.

In each will be another casket which is bigger than the first.

As the foot is larger than the sandal it wore.

The regular lines before the mistake was made.

Truth be told.

And venerated.

Bow and bow-case. Sword and scabbard. Foot and footprint. Cardigan and casket. Word and gemstone.

Dust.

And now in Rumi’s town, Konya, as this is written, and it is very dry, who said,

“being sober is not living.”

The plane-tree hollowed by age.

Descend to the lower garden.

He will approach, his eyes twin marble discs.

Use stealth and the golden door.

Step from the fountain.

Turn. He is gone. Only his stare remains.

They have put a golden roof over where you last met.

And lilies in the pond.

The ceiling is in flame with falling leaves of fire.

Yet it is cool in here.

(You have avoided the room of circumcision.) It is cool.

Leave.

As whoever enters in a casual hat.

By the window.

Leaving only the slightest of impressions on the fauteuil.

And a few scattered amphorae.

They will search high and low, left and right, and not find you.

Nor any trace, although they may take a lot of photographs, or clue.

Move past them as a shadow might into the harem of the sultan.

Do not stop there.

Notice the tiles.

Hexagons.

Their eyes like shutters they will not see who looks out by the actual shutters.

Or hear the muezzin. (Or the Qafa who sang over the relics of the Prophet in the rooms where there was the sword of King David and the apparatus for benediction formed of St. John the Baptist’s arm in its golden case.)

Will take on a desultory and dejected air.

With insufficient water for the runnel.

Under the ceiling of the harem of the sultan.

In the family room.

By the curly spigot.

Ceiling, wall and architectural anomaly.

Bedroom fountain.

In the harem of the sultan.

Hurry across the lawns below the kitchen chimneys.

Beside the stork.

Through the gates.

You will find at Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamam time for reflection, a ginger cat and çay. Wait there.

Before the explosion … in tapestry. Istanbul Modern.

The works of Yüksel Arslan.

The artist Komet.

Question.

Know the answer.

İnci Evener.

Olafur Eliasson. Your self-portrait.

Fragmented. Doubly englobed.

By the roof.

The crow.

Descent by metamorphosis.

Await the delivery of dinner.

The kedi who tries to tell you something about your dinner.