Life resonating in gaping mouths and upturned eyes. Fading ceramic tiles and lattices scorched by the afternoon sun. In hillside towns like these, human emotions tumble and roll down from the heights into deeper chambers below, into the beating heart of the souk where the oldest houses and woodworkers beat away and where fountains offer life to the veins of commerce watered from the River of Pearls, glories now turned rancid and brown with animal skin entrains and chemical dyes and the passage of sunken time.

The eye closes and the patterns remain, imprinted upon the lids like faint silk tattoos. Cumin, pepper, saffron, mustard yellow, the colour of spice and green like those heavenly gardens. Blue, the color of the rivers that once poured through. Red – the color of blood.

A pasha’s palace, Berber letters like hidden clues above the blue doorway. Its guardian, kind eyes of the desert, wiry thin clad in black and white robes. Bubble breakfast bread and succulent dates and carcasses hung out to dry above terracotta pits. Everywhere, this feeling of life being given and taken away, every minute a giver and a plunderer. An old man in his red cap, dressed in white, sings to Allah and taps away with a smile in the castle walls where rose petals and mandalas tumble to the full moon.

Sunset melancholy.

This country always gives and takes, gives and takes, and in a heartbeat a thousand seconds pass. Again, those heartstrings. Those desert cries as the full moon rises above the dusty city with white tombstones and smoke in the distance. Nostalgia for a time I feel I have known but cannot be a part of, because I ache to live a thousand lives but to live each is a lifetime. 

Firebird poetry under a painting of white clouds and the murmurs of pigeons. A phoenix rising from the ashes of temples scorched to the ground all in the name of the same God under different guises. Christian poems flow to the serpentine sounds of the desert lute, and Bavarian cellos accompany Muslim mystics. It is all one. I stare at the arabesques and as the music washes over me, I picture those delicate lattices and they begin to morph and take the form of musical notes frozen in time, captured by artist’s hands with chisel and nail. All, a form of ecstasy, a bursting radiance of life that is the same that calls out from the Persian oud and the Indian’s throat, the flower’s petals and the river’s blood. It bursts, fractals, dissolves and flows. The true artist is a channel and the best he can do is to allow it to happen, through him and into him.

A trancelike, ethereal state of mind.

I watch as dark clouds are called in by the vibrations of the violin and blanket the full moon.