Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom

Author:Stephanie Rosenbloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Before It’s Gone

Ephemeralities

The morning

wind spreads its

fresh smell.

We must get up

and take that in,

that wind that

lets us live.

Breathe before

it’s gone.

—Rumi

The week before I arrived in Istanbul, I was commuting to Times Square with its jackhammers, sirens, and Citi Bikes, the man in a Mickey Mouse costume carrying his furry head across 42nd Street like a bowling ball, flocks of pigeons missing toes, giant flashing screens, droplets that splashed onto your head from what you prayed were air conditioners.

I had just finished reading Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, in which he writes about Leonard Cohen, the singer and songwriter who spent more than five years in a monastery in California. The book put me in the mood for Cohen’s deep, gravelly voice, which is how I ended up spending several morning commutes listening to “Hallelujah” on repeat, keeping pace with horses pulling empty carriages, all of us clomping east.

It was only days later that I was ascending the steps of the Istanbul Modern museum, more than five thousand miles away. On one side was the beautiful, broken-down Tophane clock tower—the oldest of its kind in Istanbul, according to the Daily Sabah—beside leafy trees that looked as if one day they might try and swallow the clock whole. A few feet away, a tall red pillar announced ISTANBUL MODERN, previewing the museum’s industrial aesthetic, with the exposed ductwork and big windows of the old warehouse that’s now home to works by leading contemporary artists.

Among the first things I saw when I entered was a video installation called Undressing. In it, the Istanbul-born artist Nilbar Gures was hidden under layers of head scarves. She removed them one by one, reciting the names of women she knew in an effort to show, as she put it, that they are individuals, not representations of particular countries, or Islam, or “religious or nationalist ideas.”

As she peeled away the scarves, I heard in the distance a faint hallelujah. It was soft—so soft that it was nearly inaudible; the echo of a summer morning heard halfway around the world.

Hallelujah . . .

I walked toward it, deeper into the museum.

Hallelujah . . .

It wasn’t Leonard Cohen’s voice, though it was his song.

I followed the voice, past a series of black-and-white photographs by Yildiz Moran, the first female photographer in Turkey to receive academic training, as a sign explained. Toward the back of the museum, I found the source of the music: a speaker in a plastic dome hanging from the ceiling. It looked like something George Jetson might use to beam from his garage to his living room. I stood beneath it.

Hallelujah . . .

The song was part of a video installation called I Can Sing (2008) by the Turkish artist Ferhat Özgür. It had been included in his solo exhibition in New York at MoMA in 2013, but this was my first time seeing it. The video shows an Anatolian woman in a head scarf lip-synching to Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” amid a rising housing development on a road to an airport.

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