8.24.16
Each local attraction I visit is closed for, in succession, the day, the week, and the month. In my heat-born ascents and and descents among the step hills of Amman however I find myself beginning to grow into the surroundings. In each trip up the twisting stairs that wind through the bright cream of decaying stone buildings, through narrow alleys, past the shuttered homes and smaller cloistered yards, and through the strewn trash of modernity; soft-drink bottles, scraps of cardboard, discarded children toys, I find the inhabitants becoming less strange.
As the veil of otherness slips, the conservatism of the culture begins to remind me of a not-so distant age in America’s past; the old, judgmental man on the bus begins to remind me of my own grandfather, slipping into the sea of time, assaulted by confusing values in changing world; speeding out of control towards a future past the imaginings of even of his descendants, the supposed authors of this new dawn, from which they too must learn to fear in time.
This impression is heightened by a trip to a local dance-club, where Amman’s youth drink and sweat with abandon among the foreign accents of distant countries, until they are carried out, quite literally on the backs of their fellows as the music bellows and swells to the same American songs that play in the same winding succession in identical rooms in Tel Aviv, London, and likely even still, in some recondite, cloistered alley among the ruins of Aleppo.
-Alex