In Istanbul, Asli Erdogan was released from jail last night. The photos show an exhausted woman, in pain. “I feel as if I’m still inside,” she said. Where others are still. The trial resumes in four days.

Anguish causes a lot of physiological damage. The toxins take a while to metabolize. The whole ordeal must feel like an endless marathon. Breaks in the cloud cover, then the looming dread, over and over again. Laughter and tears with friends, at times? I hope so.

***

Fifty-five years after the first reading, I pick up  Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov again, this time in André Markowicz’ French translation*. Like returning to a land visited in childhood. Rediscovering the tremendous powers of irony in the man’s writing – an aspect I took for granted back then. Irony as a given, as one of the basic facts of life.

I’m hungry for poetry this morning. Read Seamus Heaney’s From the Canton of Expectation (“We lived deep in a land of optative moods, under high, banked clouds of resignation”), and Wolfe Tone (“Light as a skiff, manoeuverable yet outmanoeuvered…”)**

Remembered Philip Levine’s The Rat of Faith as I brewed the tea. If memory serves, I’d used six lines from that poem as the propelling force in writing one novel – I don’t quite remember which one.

The lines were:

I was wrong. Night after night
I wake from dreams of a city
like no other, the bright city
of beauty I thought I’d lost
when I lost my faith that one day
we would come into our lives.

Maybe faith is easier to sustain when you believe in some benevolent Higher Power? I can’t say. I do know that life is an act of faith, exhilarating at times, overwhelming or  bewildering at others. When all else fails, irony serves me better than rosary beads, that much is clear.

Seamus Heaney, again:

From the Frontier of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that space

when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect

its make and number and, as one bends his face

 

towards your window, you catch sight of more

on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent

down cradled guns that hold you under cover,

and everything is pure interrogation

until a rifle motions and you move

with guarded unconcerned acceleration –

a little emptier, a little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing

where it happens again. The guns on tripods;

the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk

of clearance; the marksman training down

out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,

as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall

on the black current of a tarmac road

past armour-plated vehicles, out between

the posted soldiers flowing and receding

like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.**

***

Dostoïevski, Les Frères Karamazov, traduit du russe par André Markowicz, Babel, Actes Sud 2002.

Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998