Into this Rock

This year, apparently, weapons are worn off the shoulder: at the airport, clear-skinned twenty-something policewomen with cooing vowels ply you over and over with the same questions. When quizzed by Israeli border troops, think less Händel, more Philip Glass: the varied reprise earns you another twenty minutes of furrowed-brow conferencing amongst the IDF riot grrlz, whereas “Why are you here?” “For work.” “Why are you here?” “For work.” gets you waved with languid hand towards the jetway to Jordan.

On the transport, my ear is transfixed by the oboistic tenor of our Jordanian guide, whose pronunciation of the word “Greeks-” a fluttering rolled “r” and an e-vowel bright as a Christmas icicle-sounds fresh as winter as we roll through battlefields of sunbaked boulders.  My mind, however, is equally transfixed by how he keeps his poker face as he tells the history of Jordan: apparently Moses, God, and glamourous Toni Gardner, who married the King of Jordan after that momentous lunch on the set of Lawrence of Arabia-are equally empirical, equally trustworthy figures in the drama of the place.  How does he do it?  I think of Sam Harris:

“Our situation is this: large numbers of people on this planet are under the impression that the Creator of the Universe has written a book.  It is our misfortune that we have several such books in existence, each making an exclusive claim to its infallibility.”

Well, Petra, blessedly, isn’t a holy site, so it’s little urgent that we pursue this line of thought.  It is, rather, a ruin both sere and molten: these carnelian canyons, with their recumbent curves of iron, of bauxite, resemble nothing so much as liquefied wax, even as all else-sun, dust, air, sky-stays steadily, pitilessly dry.  In the desert, fundamentalism seems barest logic: in a world of such stark contrasts, so narrow a margin between life and death, critical thinking must seem like a sophist’s luxury, the folly of encouched nobles gesturing overmuch with their goblets as moist palmfronds rustle in oasis torchlight: meanwhile, in cliffside caves, parched and sleepless children count and recount the same nine hundred and ninety-nine stars.  Abrahamic monotheism could have learned a bit from the ocean, I think-there’s so little of women or water, of the body and its marine ambiguities, in that thinking- but it didn’t: not really; and if polytheistic Petra had ever learned anything from the sea and its goddesses there’s little evidence of it now.  Now there are only stony relics of its architectural eclecticism (here an Ionian column, there an Assyrian idol;) only-and, most poignantly to me-a mammoth and incomplete Roman amphitheatre: the city had been starved into necropolis before the last of its stage could be completed.  What dramas might have been written for that echoing arena? What rumbling choruses might have sounded?  Larry and I are photographed before it, but we have nothing to contribute to this unanswered question of a cityscape: our work is tomorrow, in the somewhat-less-than-10,000-seat Levin Center on Sheerit Israel Street, Tel Aviv.

Nearing the Treasury, Petra, Jordan, July 2008.