THE VICISSITUDES OF TRAVELING SOLO Part II: WHIRLING DERVISHES
2000 KONYA, TURKEY
In “Traveling Solo: Part One” I described my good
luck in connecting with Ahmed who helped me use the phone, find a hotel, and
then led me to the soccer stadium where I secured the last ticket to the
Whirling Dervish performance. Had I been traveling with a friend, I would have
been reluctant to give up the seat to her, but also unwilling to take it for
myself. So, in this instance, traveling alone saved me from having to deal with
that dilemma.
A couple of hours after Ahmed left me at the hotel
I retraced my steps to the stadium where the performance would take place. I
scarcely recognized the bright new look flooding the streets. Gone were the
frumpy, gray cloaks that dominated the scene earlier that afternoon. Hundreds
of splendidly dressed men and women poured out of tour buses. Men wore western
suits. Women were draped in fashionable, flowing silk scarves. The stadium, a
cavernous cold, gray place, was made lively by men and women selling beads,
sweets, images of saints and other religious trinkets. The marriage of commerce
and holiness -common as it is - always surprised me. I wondered what Mevlana
would have made of it all.
Mevlana, born Celaleddin Rumi in 1207, escaped
massacre by Mongols in central Asia, settled in Konya, and became a much
beloved Sufi mystic and poet. He instructed his followers to “pursue all
manifestations of truth and beauty, whilst avoiding ostentation,” and to
“practice infinite tolerance, love and charity.” Mevlana revered music and
dance, and founded the Whirling Dervishes, or sema, which is believed to
create union with God.
My assigned seat was high up in the stadium, and it
was hot. I hadn’t slept enough the night before, and I soon felt overwhelmed by
drowsiness, unable to stay fully awake, yet too uncomfortable to fall asleep. I
was relieved when a couple of dozen musicians finally entered the far end of a
stage, so small and distant it was dwarfed by the rest of the huge stadium. The
musicians set up long metallic looking tubes and string instruments in shapes I
had never seen. From my seat half way to Heaven, I couldn’t see them
clearly.
The sounds began. Low dirge-like emanations
alternated with higher, almost screeching, notes. If there was a rhythm or
melody, it escaped me. A man stepped to a microphone and spoke in a low
sonorous drone, perhaps explaining what had been played or what we were about
to hear. I wished I could understand. Where was Ahmed when I needed him? I
might even have welcomed a guide. But if I were a mystic, maybe I wouldn’t need
to understand the literal words. I might simply intuit the message. A mystic
probably wouldn’t be distracted by the hard bench with no back.
Other speakers, including two women, alternated
with the music. Mevlana, according to my guidebook, had advocated a higher
status for women in religious and public life. Perhaps he would have been
pleased to hear the women speaking. At times I thought the performers were
praying, at others they sounded like poets. Perhaps for Mevlana, a religious
poet, it was all the same. The recitations soothed me, nudging me even closer
to a desperate need to sleep. As my head drooped, I silently complained that
they hadn’t started their ecstatic dancing to wake me up.
After half an hour we were given a break, and I
didn’t know whether to be sorrowful or glad. The glad part was the opportunity
to take a little walk, a moment’s respite from my sleepy doldrums. The negative
side was that I would have to endure still another wait. On the stairs and in
the hallways women and men I thought of as "trinketeers" peddled holy
medals and images, and crowds gathered around them, eager to buy.
The intermission had energized me, and I returned
to my seat fully alert. Soon, men dressed in ankle length black cloaks entered
the court in a two-by-two procession. The pace was funereal. Slowly, each man
discarded his cloak. I had read that the
tall camel’s hair hats they wore represented a tombstone. The cloak stood for
the tomb itself, and the white gowns for the shroud. Shedding the cloaks
symbolized leaving the tomb, and casting off all earthly ties. Entering into
this ethereal world would be a challenge for me, but its very strangeness
intrigued me. This was what foreign travel was about, wasn’t it?
Taking small, graceful, stylized steps, each pair
of men, about twenty paces apart from each other, inched around the arena.
There were perhaps a dozen duos, in all. The stadium floor seemed as large as a
football field, and it took slightly less than forever to traverse just one
side of it. At the far end of the arena the seyh, or current head man, awaited each pair, who turned
toward him briefly, then bowed to each other. The seyh leaned forward and appeared to kiss each of them on the tops
of their heads. The pair straightened, making room for the next pair to
approach, bend, bow and, receive the kiss. They then proceeded to twirl around
the other side of the arena. Was this the
twirling? The performers were turning around and around, but not at the fast
pace I had expected. Slowly, they advanced around the periphery of the arena
several times. I had arrived at 8:30. It was now 10:10.
At last. What seems to be more
serious whirling begins. Cloaks gone, each man’s white gown, with its full A-line
cut, creates a swirl of soft white. Expectantly, I wait for the dancers to spin
faster, and faster and faster, toward a state of ecstasy. That is my fantasy
about ecstasy. As a child I had delighted in holding my arms straight out from
my sides, while I spun around and around as fast as possible, thoroughly dizzy,
until I collapsed onto the ground in a paroxysm of joy and confusion. Ecstasy. But
in watching the performers, that childhood association turns out to be way off
the mark.
The dancers continue at the same pace, still in
pairs, and gradually circle the court, as they whirl opposite each other.
Twirling, whirling, still slowly, their delicate steps resemble no dance I have
seen. Skirts flow gracefully around them. With each twirl they advance a few
steps until every pair has made the revolution of the arena, and then they
float around again. There is something almost girlish, something very sweet,
about the sameness of the pace, the steps, the billowing skirts. The dancers,
my guide book says, represent the heavenly bodies, revolving in their own
space, at the same time as they revolve around the court. There are three
stages of the dance: knowledge of God, awareness of God’s presence, and union
with God. But I am unable to distinguish one from the other. Each performer
points his right hand upward, and his left to the floor. This gesture signifies
that grace emanates from the heavens and is distributed to the people. The
Dervishes represent the symbolic conduit.
I am mesmerized. As if mimicking the dancers, I
float in an ephemeral universe, coasting along, somewhere between sleep and
wakefulness. But now I’m content to bask forever in that altered state. I would
not call it ecstasy. I am not in a condition that’s frenetic, excited, or high.
It feels closer to zoned out. Dreamy. Or meditative. Whatever it is, I’m
content with it.
But, ever so slowly, deliberately, as if in a trance,
the dancers once more pull their black cloaks around their shoulders. It is as
if a reel is running backwards, at the same languorous pace as the whirling
began. I postpone facing the reality that the performance - and my wondrous,
mental free-fall - will soon disappear. I am not yet ready to re-enter the frenetic,
jangling world. The dancers make their round of the court one more time and
then they are gone, wafting off the stage, like ether. They have spirited
themselves away, but left me in a state of serenity. I am aware of a faint
smile on my face, and hazily remember that once I might have called such an expression
sappy. Now I am pleased to be in the lap of a tradition where all is foreign to
me.
I muse about the meaning of the dancers’ religious
ecstasy, and try to prepare for my transition into worldliness. Lazily, I let
my gaze sweep over the vast stadium walls, which are covered with dark red drapes
of rich velvet. In graceful folds, they fall from ceiling to floor. White loops
of what is apparently Arabic script appear. Their graceful curves, mysterious
to my Western sensibility, dance across the cloth, and I am enchanted. Do they
spell out a prayer? A poem? With my eye, I trace them. But a moment later a
slight shift in the drape makes the white lettering clearer. The “graceful
curves” spell out a different message in very different, very large letters:
COCA COLA
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