Magic Bus Read Free Page B

hitchhikers were raped and at least one German couple murdered along the road. I think of the bombs which have rocked Mediterranean resorts in recent months.
    â€˜For twenty-seven centuries, Istanbul hungered for new ideas,’ he answers me.
    In the year Ginsberg published
Howl
, cosmopolitan Istanbul had a population of one million: Armenians, Greeks, Jews, the sons of old Byzantine families and daughters of Ottoman households.
    â€˜But today the
da ğ li
– the villagers from the mountains – do not welcome change.’
    Turkey’s years of political turmoil ended in 1983 when prime minister Turgut Özal, a former World Bank economist, liberalized the economy and stimulated a business and tourism boom. The city’s population grew tenfold, the vast majority of new residents migrants from rural Anatolia. But many of the incomers – despite the influence of travellers, television and work in Germany – remained rooted in an earlier century. An angry minority grew embittered by their country’s race to become Western.
    â€˜The
da ğ li
are scared, by the size of the city, by liberal society, by America’s ways. They retreat into insular communities. They don’t want reform. Kalkan fixes his eyes on me. ‘They fight to survive.’
    I walk down the uneven streets. A line of late-night washing drifts in a roofless ruin. I cross the Golden Horn at Galata Bridge, still bristling with fishing rods despite the hour, and climb into a hilly neighbourhood of stepped streets and Maritime pines cradled in the Bosphorus’s arms. As I walk, I think of the Grand Tourists and the first Intrepids, about the sixties impulse to reinvent the world and today’s anxious acceptance of one’s place in it. Law students play backgammon under the vines. A yawning, veiled woman pushes a wakeful child on a swing. A sleepless mussel-seller mops his neck with a cloth.
    Istanbul touches me in the fluid Arabic script of its Iznik tiles, in its expressways built over Roman roads, in a lamb feeding on the grass precincts of a mosque. Yet for all its richness, I’m pursued by a gnawing hollowness of heart. Part of my attraction to the sixties is that era’s reverence for immediacy, for self-surprise, for the imperative to Be Here Now. Most of the time, I find it hard to seize the moment, to live every act as if it were my last. I reflect on the day, simplifying and eliminating experiences to understand exactly what stirred me, and recognize how shaken I am by the chance meeting with the dippy, weeping hippie. I worry that I lost an opportunity by letting her go.
    At that moment, a flash of light catches my eye. I look up, realizing in an instant that I want to see her line of candle flamessweep across the inky sky. Instead I watch the landing lights of a descending aircraft.
    I buy a kebab and crash out in my room.

3. The Times They are a-Changin’
    The beginnings are easy to trace.
    First,
On the Road
with Jack Kerouac, his soul stripped naked, his body hungry for release, his heart ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’.
    Next, in New York on Bleeker Street at the Mills Hotel, where Allen Ginsberg, aged twenty-four, is ‘blowing Jack’, coming out of the conformist 1950s and into the rebellious, hopeful decade.
    Then, on MacDougal at the Rienzi and the Gaslight with bongo-beaters and wide-eyed runaways in turtlenecks reading frayed copies of Kierkegaard and asking, ‘Like, where do we go from here?’ Their parents survived the Depression, came home from Normandy and Guam, took shelter in materialism and suburbia.
    Now, poets like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reject the spiritual emptiness of their unexamined lives, plead for the resurrection of America’s soul, rail against the ‘concrete continent, spaced with bland billboards, illustrating imbecile illusions of