Flying to Casablanca, from “A Poet’s Progress,” Newtopia Magazine #1
Preface
On March 15, 2007, I made a vow to spend the next ten years studying anything that caught my interest, doing everything I wanted to do, reading everything I wanted to read, seeing everything I wanted to see, traveling everywhere I wanted to travel, and writing my way through the process. I’d talked a lot about—and experimented with—having my life be my artwork, with the writing something that fell from me naturally, like leaves from a tree. But would that story be interesting as writing? Well, it’s still just a theory, so no one knows, and I certainly didn’t at the time I began. But why not give the idea at least ten years of my life? It was the perfect time for me. I wasn’t in a relationship, I lived cheaply, I made more money than I spent.
Actually, at first it was just to be for a year. But at the end of the year I‘d developed a process that created a considerable amount of writing, and at that point the habit was dragging me behind it. So it just continued. That’s when I began thinking about it as a two-year project. The first year had produced more material than I’d imagined possible, but would I have enough for another book, two books in two years? Perhaps it was just a lucky year, beginner’s luck. Anyone can write for a year.
But at the end of the second year I had more material than the first, and the third year more than the second. So a few months before the end of the fourth year it was easy to change from thinking about this as a four-year-plan to a decade-long one. A book a year, from the Ides of March to the Ides of March. The Decalogue, I would call it.
A lot of what I wanted to do involved travel. Last year—year four of the project—was Africa. I spent fifteen days in Morocco in September, and three weeks on safari in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe in December. This year has been Asia: India and Nepal in April; China, Tibet, and Cambodia in October and November. The only really expensive trip I have left on my list is to travel through Europe by boat, just like they did in the 1700s.
At least for the next year, the column “Poet’s Progress” will focus on my travel writings, beginning with my trip Morocco in September 2010, less than three months before the revolution in neighboring Tunisia. They will continue for nine weeks. Then it’s off to southern Africa, then India, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Cambodia. In April 2012, a friend and I plan to recreate Ezra’s Pound’s walk through Provence studying the troubadours on its centenary. After that, who knows?
Each column will also feature a few of my photographs and some of the music I’ve discovered during my travels. A track listing and notes for the music will follow the end of every column. But be quick: the written columns with their photos will be archived and available after the week is over, but the music will be replaced each week by a new collection.
I would like to express my appreciation to Darren Carter who has taken the music and that week’s photos and made the videos that accompany each week’s playlists.
Floor Tile, Fes
September 14, 2010
Row 12, Seats D and E, Royal Maroc Airlines Flight 009, JFK to Casablanca
Flying out of JFK, my connecting flight is late and the plane is over-sold, so I get bumped up to business class, where I sit beside a teenage Muslim girl. I’m reading Paul Bowles. She is reading Zola in French—his longest novel, Germinal. She notices that I am having trouble turning on my overhead light and shows me how to do it by pointing to her own. I first push the wrong button, thinking she is showing me which button to press, but she is pointing to the correct one with her fingertip, the way a model would.
She pulls a fashion magazine out of her bag. The article is written in French and Arabic and English. Every time she comes across an unfamiliar English word, she underlines it and opens her English-Arabic dictionary—then mouths the word under her breath until she finds the right inflection. As she reads, her left hand rises into the air, swimming back and forth. She has two phone numbers written in henna on her left palm which I can see every time she flips her wrist, like a flashcard. It’s as if I’m watching an actor rehearse for a part, imagining herself onstage, tying what she’s saying to a gesture, seeking the correct rhythm and posture and accentuation and tone.
When dinner arrives, she wipes her hands with a Wet Wipe, then eats quickly, her left hand following her right as it brings a piece of bread up to her mouth, covering her mouth as she chews, bent over, face down in her lap. She pulls out a plastic bag with plastic utensils from her bag. She cracks open the plastic wrap and the spoon shoots into the air and lands somewhere between us. We both turn to look for it at the same moment, and she looks up at me, her face very close to mine, and smiles. “It is gone … Insh’allah.” She shrugs and laughs. I laugh out loud and she smiles an even bigger smile and her eyes light up as well.
She’s drinking Coke Light and reading an article about a French fashion show. Although she is dark-skinned, the back of her hands are pale, almost white. She has a gold ring on the middle finger of her right hand. On her left wrist she is wearing a slim black and silver watch and a plastic yellow “Live Strong” bracelet.
She stops to read an article on how to cook a whole goat on a spit. She leaves the magazine open and pulls a journal out of her carry-on. I can see several greeting cards, most of them with roses, and color photographs of watches and bracelets and diamond necklaces cut out of fashion magazines. When she steps into the aisle to open the overhead compartment I can see a thin strip of skin exposed between her jeans and the hem of her brown woolen sweater. She finds a pen and opens her journal and enters something in French, writing right-handed from right to left. The pages are made of graph paper, and she writes on every other line. When she has finished a sentence she goes back to the beginning and re-reads everything, sliding her finger under the words as she reads from right to left, moving her lips as she reads, bent over as if to shield what she has written.
When the man in front of her suddenly drops his seat all the way back, almost crashing into her head, she gasps and sits up quickly, her hands shooting over her head and shrieking, then shrugging her shoulders and rolling her eyes. She gets up and comes back with her iPod, the same strip of muscled belly as she stretches. I can see her hip bones. She brushes her scarf over her ears to put in the earphones, exposing a small silver diamond earring. She searches through her music and I can hear a tenor singing in Italian. Adjusting her earplugs, I can see her fingernails are bitten down to the soft skin, the puffy pads around her nails red and swollen.
The in-flight movie is “Cop Out” and she puts on her headphones and turns it up loud enough that I can almost follow the dialogue. She occasionally giggles and because she’s wearing earphones doesn’t realize how loud she’s laughing—it’s the light happy laugh of a child and everyone around her starts to smile as well.
After dark she falls asleep, her head sliding onto my shoulder. When the lights come on in the morning she sits up, unaware for a moment where she is, then looks up at me and sleepily smiles.
She fills out her customs form, counting out the numbers with her fingers. When she’s finished, she asks me if she can get me anything to drink from the cabin, and looks confused and then genuinely offended when she realizes I’m telling her that I’m not thirsty. “How can you not be thirsty,” she sniffs, turning away, frowning. She gets up and comes back with hot tea, orange juice, and a bottle of water she’s refilled. She puts the cups on her tray and says, “If you want either of these, you can have anything you want.” Then she takes out two paper cups and pours us each a cup of water.
As we get ready to disembark, she pulls down her carry-on bag and takes out a white pork pie hat with a black satin bow and a silver hummingbird clasp. Then she takes out a pair of large round black sunglasses with golden clasps, puts them on and walks onto the tarmac, blinking up into the sun, searching for her family.
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