Recently in Postcards from the Edge Category

Lastovo: isolated Adriatic island of jagged hills clad in holm oak and aleppo pine, where the sea laps sunbleached stones with tongue translucent blue. 

Settled by Illyrians and later controlled by Rome, over the centuries it was destroyed by Venice for harboring pirates, joined the Dubrovnik Republic, and passed through the hands of Napoleonic France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, to finally become a part of independent Croatia. 

Unlike other island settlements, Lastovo Town faces inland. It's stone buildings cling to a natural amphitheater whose basin is fertile with olives and vines. Earlier settlements consolidated on this more defensible site when the people abandoned piracy and turned inward to a life of agricultural self-sufficiency. That same independent spirit is still evident in Lastovo islanders today.

It's a quiet place of lazy heat haze days sipping cappuccino and soaking up village life. Outside a café, an old man in a patched jacket shouts insults at passing youngsters: "Cut your hair Stjepan! You look like a girl!" The other old men chuckle and cough. Stjepan's defense is to talk back in a normal voice as he continues to walk, resisting the urge to look back over his shoulder.

On Lastovo's south side, rocky beaches and barren hills abound with hidden coves - the perfect place for a private swim. I spend my island afternoons plunged in the briny deep, or in sun-soaked sophistry on shore. At sundown, hitchhike back across to my room in Lučica - a narrow inlet of half-abandoned 15th Century stone houses, where we wash down seafood dinners with house wine. And it really is house wine - each house makes their own.

Certain skies have the power to sharpen eyesight.

It is the map maker who actually creates the world, and in a landscape devoid of features, cartography turns inward.

Far below the walls of Dier Mar Moussa, the sands stretched out like a hazy veil beyond the perpetual present; beyond even remembering.

Such a landscape brought to mind the Temptations of St. Anthony. Exiled voices. Delirious days baked mad by the cruelty of the sun. Crisp nights of solitude beneath a coffee stain moon. I wanted to know that landscape shaken by storm, its vast spaces rent by lightning and wind--beset by an utterly theological sky.

I understood what the desert fathers sought in this emptiness. Not the religious aspects or their spirituality. But the space. The landscape. The silence and how it connects you to yourself.

The caves of ascetics punctured the crest of the hill above me. Their hollow mouths swallowed materialism, habit, linear progress, and the opiate fumes of ill-constructed dreams. And replaced them with.... what?

I climbed the slope and crawled inside.

Sitting there encased in stone, it was easy to find silence.

I thought about our travels through Syria. Of the laughs we shared. Of intimate moments with friends. Of how funny it seemed each time it all went south.

The space between my thoughts spread out.

My body grew heavy as the flesh lost its hold.

Silence replaced it.

And that was all.

Islands are places where different destinies can meet in the fullness of isolation, and in their own time. Island time doesn't match the time of other places. The ideal island is a whole world, and even a tiny island may contain multitudes.

moonlight echoes through nighttime streets
reverberating off walls of limburger cheese
and the yellow plaster of peeling bandages
over Poseidon blue.

razor wounds
or Time's shaving nicks?

black cats scuttle
through dead-end alleys
like fading dreams they dissolve into cognac fumes
rain dogs howl and the light peels away
as the evening train mourns its passing with a brassy wail
and a clack of ivory teeth on day-old bread.

the ghost of Durrell wafts through on a telltale scent of wine
possessing those he touches
pulling them into his
hedonist
booze-soaked
aphrodisiac
world
with the magic of the grape and the lure of lost inhibitions.

for a while you inhabit the novel
until the reel world intrudes
and pulls you to earth with Icarian finality
plummeting into the day-to-day
with fluttering stomach and limbs of lead
to crashland in mundanity

not with a thud
but with a whimper of remorse.

I'm 31 feet below ground at the Delta One (D-01) launch facility, standing in a reinforced concrete tube, behind a foot-thick steel blast door. A loop of Cold War tunes plays in my head: The Final Countdown, followed by 99 Red Balloons (the English version, with that sexy accent). I'm facing a grey metal control panel with several bakelite telephones and a number of switches--but only one of them matters.

I've got my hand on the key. And I have to admit, I'm tempted.

What if I could switch the targeting? A list of all those who have ever wronged me flashes through my mind. Noisy neighbours. Overbearing border officials. The Japanese postal service (who once held up a shipment of fadge my father had sent me at great expense, and which arrived a month late festering with mold). Egging the homes of these people would be one thing, but 1.2 megatonnes of thermonuclear annihilation would send another message entirely.

I turn the key, and it clicks home.

Nothing happens.

"Hey! I told you not to touch anything! Get away from there!"

I'm being scolded by the tour guide, who has been provided exclusively for my photographer and me.

That's when I remember I'm in a museum.

A Postcard from Celeryhenge

Deep in the forests of a rainy northern isle, far beyond the cities and the moss-choked walls, lies one of our most enduring mysteries: the world's largest primitive megavegetal site.

Who or what piled these stalks in such deliberate patterns, and why? Was it an observatory to track the movements of the bowels? Was it an ancient site of worship? Was it just a giant culinary make-work project? What the hell was it for? We'll probably never know for sure.

There's a strange energy about the place; a fork in the road of reality. It's like a hunger. It just sorta grows on you and scours you out ... You relive your salad days in a crisp series of lucid flashbacks, but they fade and leave a bland taste in your mouth.

The wind as it whispers through the stalks sounds like voices. Animals become uneasy. The back of cat's necks bristle. I feel I'm being watched--as though the Vegetalista or some other herbaceous spirit were hovering just over my shoulder.

The weirdest thing is that the monument changes. During a dry spell it almost seems to wilt and go limp. Then, as if overnight, it seems to stiffen and regain its shape--almost as though it knew it had rained...

To me, a library has always been a sacred place. I went there as a child in search of silence and reflection, just as others seek the dim solace of a church. I went there to find answers to my questions, just as others might seek a priest in times of distress. Sometimes I went there simply for the atmosphere--the smell of the books, the soft tread of shoes on worn green carpet, the weight of the silence. The smell of old books takes me back there with the same immediacy that the smell of incense and candle wax has for the Catholic.

Libraries are the accumulated storehouse of our collective memory, containing more volumes than you could ever read or even leaf through in a lifetime. The sum of all our parts: the hardcover stacks of our past, the crinkling present with its smudge of fresh periodical ink, and the paperback shelves of our most distant sci-fi future. They contain our collective consciousness; our deeds, hopes and dreams, and all that we have ever done or thought, both good and bad: nothing less than the thread of our collective growth as a species.

It is in libraries that the incredible miracle of the human race is contained, not in crumbling stones, because it is only in libraries that the story of the human race can come alive. And so, to visit the modern reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, once the font and seat of all Western knowledge, was for me a form of Hajj, a religious duty.

Photo by Jason George

The tortured sounds of the alphabet song drifted across the lobby for the fifth time that day. From the next room, rising above the muffled voices, I heard, "Teacher, what does it mean, 'feces'?" I sighed and rubbed my eyes, fighting sleep.

"What is.... what is surprise?" Tomio, the pudgy bald Japanese salaryman sitting across from me, jiggled a leg beneath the table and looked up from his textbook. "I don't know this word 'surprise.'"

Without blinking an eye I nailed the table with my fist. Pens and pencils leaped to the floor. Tomio bleated like a startled sheep.

"Yeah, that's it," I said.

"Bikkurishita! I am scared!" Struggling to control his fluttering heart, he twitched and squirmed and adjusted his tie. "You are mean! Ryan is mean!"

"Well, you won't forget 'surprise' again, will you?"

Desert travel blurs all time sense. I don't know if it's the hypnotic motion of the camel or the endless monotony of the scenery. The mind works on two levels simultaneously. The automatic level is watching the route, choosing a path, adjusting for balance. The other level is flowing along rivers of memory, through labyrinths of thought, reliving past events and acting out future possibilities.

Day after endless desert day I plodded through the burning, shifting sands. I watched as the course of my life played itself out in the theatre of my mind. My past unrolled like a film: all the twisting convolutions of happenstance, all the chance meetings and unforeseen events that led me there to desert sands half a world away. I reeled into the future and played out possibilities, stopping to reel back and play out new paths.

Abdul Rahim called a halt. A two-hour ride lasted six by the clock. The desert sun melts time as easily as it does plastic.

A thin mist broke over pale green rice fields in a wet hill-wrapped bowl in the Shan Highlands of northern Burma. An ox chewed its cud. Smoke rose from bamboo huts on the fringes, and longyi-clad men swung slow-motion sickles in garden plots. From over the next hill came the plaintive cry of the train from Mandalay, winding laboriously from village to village, overloaded with produce, creaking under the weight of the country's isolation for lack of spare parts.

As we squelched along the muddy track I turned to my companion, a Shan man in his late thirties. His arms were tattooed with symbols in the Burmese script.

"What does it mean?" I asked. I'd seen similar markings on men throughout the country.

"A spell," he said with a smile and a shrug. "A charm to keep away snakes. Many Burmese have them. We use the Shan script because the spirits cannot read."