From Hagia Sophia, held in imagination, emanates this cavernous sensation, a still magnificence. I am here, at an Ikea desk, looking through plastic slats over satellite dishes to a gray art deco imitation and a bright sun; they were there, wearing cloaks and beards, probably stepping off horses into clouds of warm dust, men nearby holding swords and spears who took orders from a man still called Caesar; just a few hundred meters away from a blue sea on which sailed ships holding clay jars of wine and olive oil; walking under soaring arches I have also walked under, seeing mosaics I have seen, debating, creating, and writing down words I have sung and said over a thousand times. Shivers. I am looking directly at the point of creation of that which is at once mystical and mine.
Maybe it’s inherited from the French and English peasants, right as they decided to become crusaders (I feel it, too, in the last stanza of Allegri’s Miserere, when the C sung on the “ru” of Jeruuuuusalem peels so high it scrapes residue off the roof of your brain). A place, Eastern and exotic, known to be real, opening a physical connection to their religion, which for them monopolized all fathomable mystery and grandeur. This religion is not mine, I’m pretty sure, certainly not in any way connected to bread and wine, miracles, concrete pledges written in Nicaea or anywhere else, etc. But maybe I do hold it, not as something with such personal agency as to be assigned omnipotence, but as something that while existing one or two dimensions up from whatever is our upper limit of comrprehension, is still inside our red bodies. Whatever that is, for some reason, feels like it may live in some thicker form than in our concrete landscape, around these ancient sites.
Or maybe in imagining these sites I’m not connecting with the actually divine, but with history itself, which I experience as as a kind of divinity. I am communing with the place that I know, intellectually, through the march of a multitude of unknowable moments, eventually resulted in me, and everyone and everything I know. Opening up a tight beam to a deep part of my past, bypassing uncountable generations, from which I inherited many things, religious, linguistic, philosophical, and otherwise. Traditions and laws and phrases and even subconscious ways of thinking.
That it could be, in some small way, that some place so old and so grand has something to do with my life, fills the space that wonders, what place, what family, in this global community, in this never-ending global story, am I a part of? What is mine, where am I descended from? If in life I’m bored or preoccupied, in this connection, here is some warmth, some magic.
That’s what’s inside the hulking stone shoulders of this old Byzantine church. What I feel when I imagine a high tenor and gravelly baritone ensemble echoing around the shadowy columns, when I look at the the shimmering gold pieces assembled into broad landscapes, or when I consider, what it must have looked like, before light pollution, to see the dome glowing in the night sky from miles away. When I think of Constantinople, “the city,” keeper of the dim but eternal Roman flame.
Alright, alright: what is all this cloying sanctimony about connection, faith, family, place, if not part of a fantasy of geopolitical sports, written out of the imagination of a bored choirboy, feeling placeless and cold except for singing words written millennia ago in the Middle East?
But seeing Hagia Sophia turned back into a mosque, I feel sad. For the century in which most of the world reasoned by science and cultivated tolerance, it was a museum; it belonged to everyone. Now, it feels closed to anyone’s imagination, reserved for an exclusive purpose. Another loss in this turn of hardness and fear.