The beauty of the Middle East
This is an excerpt from my journal.
By “beauty”, I am not referring to my Apollonian looks and disarming modesty. No full body naked selfie for you today. Sorry!
The Middle East is a place where cultures meet. Milieux which can be understood as distinct may also be seen as blending into each other.
In Cyprus where I live, we officially are a European Union member state. If you look at the map, you will notice that the island is closer to Lebanon than it is to the next EU country’s mainland. Yet our political orientation is Western in its outlook and Westernising in its function.
Part of this ideology is the historical trajectory of Cyprus as a colony of many Western empires. Though at the level of narrative the major source is the thought of the Enlightenment Age. It branded Hellenic culture as Western, while also reducing the vastness of Greek thought into a rationalist project, which was en vogue back then.
The more I reason about Greek culture, the more I realise and integrate its holistic worldview. This is obvious already at the artistic level, with the intuition of polytheism. Many gods represent the many facets of our experience, as well the many aspects of the world which are, in principle, not necessarily known to us. Yet all gods partake of a singular godhood, which suggests that the many are the one, the one is the many, the way a single ray of light can also be seen as a spectrum of colour.
Any given person illustrates said multifacetedness. You are reasonable yet also have an emotional side. Your mind grasps the transcendent while your body confines you to the here-and-now of everyday necessities. You represent admixture. However constituted, you emerge as the interplay of many factors, of processes that are notionally internal to the system you are, as well as stimuli that occur exogenously.
You look around as your attention discerns patterns. Everything looks different. I am not like you and you are not like a tree and this tree is unlike that other tree. There is individuation throughout. Though as you continue to observe and to study attentively, you stop seeing individuality emerging from the disparate data points. You are instead finding the similarity of things. A bird represents admixture, as does a plant, as does a society, as does our historical trajectory, as does this planet, and so on. At one level, these are all distinct. At another level, they are instances of the same underlying pattern and ultimately of pattern as such.
The Middle East is a place with an actual history and unmistakable characteristics. Though it also is a metaphor for this commonality through diversity. I have met people from so many different backgrounds here. Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis, Egyptians, Iranians, Pakistanis… The list goes on. And I have talked to even more of them through video calls.
If you are searching for reasons to differentiate people, then you can go down to the individual. Each person has something unique to them. And if you want to find similarities, you can easily look past whatever differences. Analytically, both are correct. It then is a matter of one’s attitude in pursuit of a certain end.
I like to connect with people from diverse backgrounds. Unlike other fellow leftists, however, I do not do it by denying my ethnicity. I think that is a mistake because you then act like you do not have a cultural background. You sit at a table with people from Northern Europe, for example, and you immediately notice that your Eastern Mediterranean zest does not fit right in. This is fine. My point is that pretending it is not there is not a helpful starting point.
I acknowledge the fact of my Greekness yet do not let it become an obstacle in the way of talking to others. This is why I mostly write in English and why I want to be as good as I can in as many languages as possible. Right now I am relearning French and will then brush up on my Spanish. Long-term, I am interested in Turkish and Arabic, in no particular order, since they are of immediate geographic relevance where I am located.
Cyprus feels like home to me. This is where my land and my house are. Though it also is a place that has a strong vibe of the aforementioned admixture that the Middle East metaphorically captures. I am a country bumpkin in these mountains, in many ways irrelevant to what is going on around me, yet I still manage to continuously meet people from all over the broader region and the world at-large.
It is nice when we play ball together. It is not nice when each wants a ball to themselves.