A Full Moon In Each Eye.
By Andy Jordan, Berkeley, CA
I am student and practitioner of story. I come from a long line of storytellers. I think stories drive our human experience, and help us find joy and hope. When I first read Ovid’s Metamorphosis in college, a story about telling stories, I came to realize that our understanding of stories are very myopic; we tend to cling to the most well-known, recent, or convenient versions.
The stories of my life often incorporate mountains: perhaps it’s my hunger and connection to the spirit world, of which mountains serve as a medium from this physical realm. Perhaps, I love mountains.
This story starts with a mountain that will probably elicit winces. While I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, I spent time on and near Mt. Ararat in far eastern Turkey on the border with Armenia and near the border with Iran. I was sent there to report and produce a short film on a potential border opening between Turkey and Armenia, two “tribes” bitterly divided after the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. Like most stories I am drawn to, it was one with horrific origins, but where humans later try to find a hopeful, defiantly joyful way forward.
The story was about an enormous hand of peace.
As I spent time reporting in and around Kars, Turkey, I found myself deep in the caverns of an enormous salt mine in efforts to understand local beliefs about the nature of the mountain and the local Turks’ relationship with Armenians, and how locals were scraping by financially.
It was deep in the range that touches Ararat. The literal salt of the Earth. There was pink salt and sludge everywhere I turned, but I remember being struck at not being able to smell anything besides the odor of deep earth and dampness. Salt needs water to really activate its smell. Salt, like water, is also essential for human life. And incidentally preserves our food, which we are starting to have conversations about, as our food supply chains are disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As I went deep under the Earth near Ararat, I recall thinking at the time how abundantly the Earth provides, and how liberally humans take.
I later incorporated this reporting into an interview I did with Turkey’s now seemingly “Putin-style” permanent President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who appeared to fall asleep during the interview. (Those parts not included in final video, which Erdogan’s handlers made sure of.) Erdogan, I believe, is an archetype of our time: someone who seeks power for greed and personal gain.
I believe we are at an inflection point, a fulcrum, where we face our greed, our “everyone-for-him/her self” mentality, and ameliorate it.
The darkness and emptiness of Kars, Turkey and the mysterious spiritual energy of Mt Ararat, long associated with gods, invoked feelings I won’t forget. They resonate with me now in this time of isolation and desolation.
I feel duty-bound to tell you, though: Mt. Ararat is where Noah’s Ark rests. Just so you know. I looked but couldn’t find it. I thought I noticed a very old donkey toe, but that wasn’t it, I’m almost certain.
“Noah’s Ark is fake!”, you say. So are many stories.
And turns out there is FAR more to the tale of Noah’s Ark and its association with this volcanic holy mountain, that pre-dates Christianity, and the Old Testament in which it is “conventionally” featured. If you haven’t learned it by now, Christians stole and appropriated many of the best pagan and mythological stories for the Bible, a man-made book of stories. Some of them are good. But the pagan stories are better. I always look to find the deeper origins of the stories I read, as stories tend to change over time, especially over long courses of time.
Long before the Bible, Noah’s Ark, Christianity, and the time period of the Old Testament, (to the tune of 20th–16th centuries BCE), there was the Atrahasis version of the Babylonian flood story, where great waters descended on what is now Mt. Ararat, sent by the gods to reduce human over-population, and after the flood, the gods tried to assure over-population wouldn’t happen again.
This story comes to mind at a time when we look at an Earth that cannot sustain the exponential human growth and population we have imposed on it. It never was meant to.
Back to the Bible for a sec, and Genesis 11: 1–9, The Tower of Babel, thought by some to have existed in ancient Babylonia, was erected with man’s hubris, to reach heaven, when all earthlings spoke one language. Humans thought they could build a tower to Heaven. And with one language and “one” tribe, they thought they could accomplish this, on their own. This hubris angered God in the days after the “great flood”, so he created different languages and scattered humans across the globe. This, one might posit, is how we got “tribes”, and perhaps religions, which are, after-all, man-made constructs chiefly designed to help us all face our own mortality. Death is scary, I get it.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Even the Biblical version reverberates in this time. God sent a flood to rebuke human wickedness and hubris. God was essentially giving humans a reset button, to start over with enough humans and animals to make another go. According to Biblical accounts, Noah set free a dove after the flood to find land, and it brought back an olive branch. And today, many religions and peoples consider the dove and olive branch a sign of love and peace.
It’s unfortunate love and peace are not what most religions embrace as their core pillars. Christianity in America has become largely a mechanism for hate, where bigots cherry-pick ancient verses written by long-ago fallible men, to justify their own intolerance and discrimination. I know this because I’m gay, and with the exception of my immediate nuclear family, not a single Christian I know “celebrates” my sexuality. That’s OK. I’ve learned how to celebrate and love myself, without your version of the Bible, and without you in my life. And I have carried the rituals and power of the Eucharist and prayer through my life, despite your hate. The stories of the Bible are for me, just as much as they are for those of you who use it for hate. God made me gay. It was a great gift to me, and to the world. I am special that way. Some may even say that gays were sent to Earth to control the human population. Some even say we are God’s warriors. And you’re just straight. But that’s OK. I will “tolerate” you. (wink emoji).
So some of the stories of the Bible still carry weight for me, and the “great flood” is among them.
I’m not saying I believe any of this Noah’s Ark tale happened *literally*, but I believe the message of this story is significant, and relevant for this time we find ourselves in. We are being given a reset button with COVID-19, to check our hubris, just like God was trying to do with humans in the “great flood.”
During my time around “Noah’s Ark” at the Turkish/Armenian border, I came across an ancient city called Ani. It’s known as the “City of A Thousand and One Churches”. I shot a lot of footage inside some of these incredibly beautiful, and incredibly ancient crumbling buildings and holy places. It sits currently in Turkey, but is a heritage symbol and a great source of pride and spiritual meaning for Armenians, who once inhabited its lands. It’s currently a militarized no-man’s land, similar in scope and feel to the DMZ, which I lived near for a year in South Korea. Ani is desolate and apocalyptic, eery and ethereal at the same time.
Ani has become a symbol for the bitterness between Armenians and Turks. And so it sits, as it has for hundreds of years, untouched.
It’s a striking landscape that I essentially had to bribe and maneuver my way into filming. I am drawn to ancient spirits and guides.
By some accounts, the name for Ani stems from the same Greek word “anion”, which means “thing going up.”
In English, anions exist in chemistry, and are atoms that hold a negative charge. It’s one of two types of ions. The ions that hold the positive charge are called cations. In many crystals, anions are bigger, and the little cations fit into the spaces between them. I find that beautiful. But they attract each other. I’d like to think the ancient city of Ani, like the anions of chemistry, is waiting for its positive charge: for the Armenians, and Turks to unite. If that happens in my lifetime, even if I’m 95, I will go there. Just like I will go to Korea when North and South unite. But healing for this kind of atrocity will likely take a few generations to heal.
I remember sitting in the isolation of a sparse hotel in Kars, after filming Ani, moved to tears at what I saw, and the spiritual significance of this ancient and isolated land, and then trying for hours with spotty phone connections, to reach my boyfriend at the time in New York, where we both lived. By the time we were able to talk, and the glitchy phone lines allowed us to hear each other, he broke up with me on the phone, while I was in the midst of this lonely, deeply sad isolation. He said I was traveling too much, which I often did for WSJ. I remember hanging up, and thinking, wow I am truly alone. In the middle of nowhere. I cried, but as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of the stubborn optimism of this beautiful ancient city of Ani, and I had good dreams that night.
New York itself made up some of the loneliest times of my life. I’ve never felt so alone. I would go weeks if not months and go to work and come home, afraid of people, afraid of the frenetic energy, bombarded on the subway daily with happy couples, and people seeking money and fame and fortune. Connection is very hard in New York. It’s so hard to get from one end of the city to the other, that connecting with friends became a test of how you fit in their pecking order. I knew NO one when I moved there. Finding friends is even tougher in New York. While there is no other place like New York in the world, and I believe everyone should live there once, I hated New York mostly but came to understand it’s purpose in my life.
Amid the isolation in one of the world’s busiest cities, I found pockets of joy. It’s where I met one of my best friends, a kind soul named Patrick, who is otherwise known as the Mayor of Big Bad Manhattan. He softened me on NYC. He’s lived there for many years, and knows hundreds of people, yet found room for me. He saw through my pain and loneliness and was reliably there for me, even when the city gave me panic attacks and encouraged deep isolation. He brought me out into the metropolis, and introduced me to a new world of music. I discovered Sunny’s Bar in Redhook, Brooklyn, my refuge, where on Saturday nights, they would have bluegrass hoedowns, where anyone could come and play in unison, impromptu, together. I usually brought my harmonica, because you can just blow in that thing when you’re surrounded by fiddles, and banjos and guitars, and nobody will notice that I have no idea what I am doing. “Key of E? OK!” (Randomly blows). These kind strangers came together over music, and carried me, and let me be a part of a joyful noise. Strangers. Humans, brought together in common song. It was a refuge amid the “disconnection” NYC represented for me. It was something that could have only happened in NYC.
Patrick never asked what was wrong, though obviously something was. I couldn’t raise my head, look people in the eye or form words for months at a time. Going into work was torture. But Patrick always just moved me forward, with no questions. Only comfort and joy. I love him for that. Patrick and I would take tiny tokes of medicinal pot out of his one-hitter, a metal cylinder that looked like a cigarette, and walk the streets of Manhattan late at night and cat-call the hot firemen, laugh and laugh and eat New York slices and feel human in a city of non-human scale. We would walk down “rat-alley” on East 1st street somewhere between 1st and 2nd Avenues in the East Village, and stomp our feet and look at the rats scatter.
I would describe Patrick as very “salt of the earth”, which is an interesting phrase. It typically signifies someone of great worth and reliability.
But its origins are more complex. Like many stories in America, the phrase stems from the Bible.
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
Matthew 5:13
If you can’t taste salt, is it of no value? To taste salt, you need smell. And to smell salt, you need water. It’s all interdependent.
In Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale, he writes of salt.
Ye been the salt of the erthe and the savour.
One theme of the Summoner’s Tale, as told in the Canterbury Tales, is religious corruption because the friar is using his power of the church for his own personal gain. Using that kind of power for bad was a sin in the Middle ages. It should be a sin now. Manipulating religion for intolerance, hate and division is indefensible.
Religion and fundamentalism have corrupted our Earth, in a sense. They divide and conquer, for personal gain. For greed. Our need to distract ourselves from our own deaths, which most religions try to address, has led to a world of power and money for their own sake… you could say it’s led to an America of Kardashians — there is no there there. Things, money, power are beside the point.
Which takes me back to the salt caves of far eastern-Turkey and the ancient lands on which Mt. Ararat sits. I couldn’t smell the salt. The salt of the Earth.
In some old legends and stories about the term “salt of the Earth”, it’s the powerful and aristocratic who are “above the salt” and valued workers are “worth their salt.” I would not be surprised to hear those phrases when describing who will escape the COVID-19 economic crisis that brings into sharp, wide focus, the extreme inequity of American late capitalism and oligarchy. The wealthy have headed to posh bunkers, while those gig-economy and low-wage but “vital” workers who are “worth their salt” have to wait for a stimulus check that won’t secure their future, and in many cases, may never come. Shame on America. Shame on our failed state.
But I couldn’t smell the salt.
Smell is probably my favorite of my senses. I’ve always wanted to be a synesthete, so I could smell colors and music. I’ve read recently where one of the symptoms of COVID-19 is losing your sense of smell. This is especially cruel to me. Smell gives us life. We smell food and perfume, the stuff of community and love and romance. Smell is primarily how we “taste” food.
Just like salt needs water to carry smell, and anions need cations, Armenians need Turks. We need each other for this grand human experiment to work.
We live to love. To connect. That is the gift we have been uniquely given as humans. The rest is beside the point.
One of my favorite poets, Hafiz, writes about this:
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear?— Hafiz
Our obsession with power and greed, to be “above the salt” has nearly ruined the Earth, and created a world of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, with very little middle ground. We are all connected. To the stars, to the universe, to each other. The rest is just a story we tell ourselves.
Why not look to life, as precious and short as it is, and be the one true story everyone else is dying to hear?
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For the next in this series, head here.
To read the other chapters in this series, go here. (Read from the bottom up, if you want to read in order). Bottoms up!
