Everything I find in this book—Attila’s photos, Attila’s seven-yearlong
journey, all the people he met, those who looked towards him
and those who didn’t, the old, the young, and those without age,
the soft-skinned and the weathered, all the places where he put
down his bag, all the homes into which he was invited, since noone
can enter a home without invitation, for if they do it is no
longer a home, all the places that people cover their shoulders
with, as if those places were cloaks, and the abandoned places
awaiting the next arrival, called abandoned because nobody can
tell whether the waiting will last minutes or millennia, all the
thousands of cloths remembered by Attila’s camera with their
embroideries, their dyes, their flowers, chosen to give a colour like
a name to some desire, colour and desire are inseparable, they are
the first story, a story without a voice until the tattoo gave it one,
and Deq* the darkness the eyes of a face find when the face is
buried in another’s hair, and all the pain without which there
would be no pity in animals, and there is, and all the pains which
have left lines the gifted can read to foresee the future, also the
pains resisted with a stone between the teeth, and all the
moments of relief with their roars of laughter, laughter the call of
the pursued who have outrun their pursuers not for ever but for
now, and then all the expectations, not hopes for they belong to
the soul and expectations to the body, the expectations no third
eye can intercept for they compress all into only one desire, the
expectations accompanying the memories a camera may trigger,
the expectation of growing up, all the findings of answers
communicated by the eyes and otherwise unsaid, and the pages
written by fellow writers, we who are here swimmers in the long
journey’s river, carrying notes jotted on scraps of paper between
our teeth—everything I find in this book, everything adds up to a
single character called Ebru, Ebru is a thinker, more likely a kid
today than an elderly person, who reads Empedocles whilst
crossing and re-crossing Anatolia, Empedocles, a doctor in Sicily,
two and a half millennia ago, who observed that everything which
exists, made from the four intelligent elements of fire, water,
ground and air, is continually striving either to be one or to be
many, guided either by Love or by Strife, and this is why, in all their
diversities and similitudes, they exist eternally and are to be celebrated.
“In Anger they have different forms and are all apart,
But in Love they come together and are desired by one another.
For from these comes everything which was and which is
and will be -
trees spring up, and men and women
and beasts and birds and fish that live in the water
and even gods, long-lived and highest in honour.
For these themselves exist, and passing through one another
they become different; for the mixture interchanges them.”**
I salute Ebru
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