Baku, city of flames. On the shores of the Caspian, I looked out upon the fallen ashes of the past, the embers glowing in the distance. In memory was fire, in dreams it burned. Nietzsche once wrote, “if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you”. But I gazed into the sunrise of the Dreamlight Horizon, and I was set ablaze.
I arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan at dawn. It is a pleasant city, and starting at the Qiz Qulesi, the Maiden’s Tower, I started to explore the old town. Walking into the heart of ancient Baku, I passed clean, smooth buildings, in a cluster of alleys winding around to the top of the view, the houses fading with a muted, yellowish tint of smooth cream shade. The heat did not yet burn, but the winding climb felt heavy with every step.
Here in these winding back alleys of the ancient city, people went about their daily life. Moustachioed men outside their shop-fronts remonstrating, jabbing their index finger in the air, engaging in laughing discussion. Often you can find serious-faced chess players sat outside a cafe, intensely concentrated on the life and death match of this ancient art. Garry Kasparov, whom many consider the greatest chess player of all time, came from Baku, from these windy streets. I came across an old lady wearing a headscarf, rolling a mound of dough, ready to make the daily bread. Life here was slow and languid, protected from the world in this ancient cluster of history. It is now a Unesco protected site, yet at times I was the only person in this quiet place.
I came to the Palace of the Shrivanshahs, in the heart of the old city, which is thought to date from the 12th Century. Ars Islamica, the art of ancient civilisations that once stretched all the way from Samarkand, the Garden of the Soul from the East, through Damascus, the Perfumed Paradise, all the way to the west of Europe to Cordoba, the Ornament of the World. Here in Azerbaijan, in a quiet corner of the raging tide of time, I stood in silence under an Islamic arch, ornately decorated with a wreath of flower designs and calligraphy, carved into the whitewashed stone. It was dark inside with a view to nowhere. I stared into the shadows, with no reply.
Walking through Baku, I was at peace. I came upon an ornate stone fountain, washed my face in the water and sat down to rest. After a brief repose, once again I started to walk.
The word Baku is derived from the Persian word “kubidan”, to pound, and Bad-Kube is said to mean “wind-pounded city”. The present city, Baku, is below sea-level, and although in the summer the intense heat by the Caspian burns the skin, the city is often surrounded by a raging wind.
It is a well-to-do, affluent city, the streets are clean, and strolling through the wide boulevards of the modern avenues, it was impossible not to warm to the city’s grandiose charm. The city it most reminds one of is Paris. In fact, it is the same style of architecture found throughout Paris, as built by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who carried out the program of new boulevards, parks and public works. Here in Baku, the wide boulevards and boxy, grandiose buildings rising up high in a linear design with their tall windows and large balconies, gave a grand colonial feeling, reminding one of being a flâneur, taking a long stroll through Parisian city streets.
It is an elegant city of clean marble facades. Yet as Baudelaire once wrote, “memories weigh more than stone”. One does not need to have studied the history of Azerbaijan to surmise that the city is a product of its geographical location. Persians from nearby Iran are the predominant influence, as the appearance of its citizens and language is of the northern Iranian ethnicity and the culture of Tabriz.
However the influence of Soviet Russia is impossible to ignore, as this was a country ruled by the USSR throughout much of its modern history. In the outstanding “Beneath Another Sky”, Norman Davies writes about the history of Azerbaijan and the Soviet control over its wealth, the amendment of the Persianised, Islamic influence upon it and the other empires that passed through this centre of the world. These empires clashed, as different empires always do, blood was spilled, wars were fought, and the area settled into today’s peaceable harmony; and now there is a true mixture, a very diverse and unique feeling of what it is to be in and of Azerbaijan, a distinctive culture of all its own.
I looked up at the sun, and the summer heat weighed upon me like the weight of the sea. As I climbed up to the top of the panorama, I saw the city skyline spread out before me from above the line of timeworn houses underneath. The corniche stretched out in the distance, a winding boulevard in a curved street-path along the lake.
I continued to walk. Eventually, making a turn among the green leafy avenue, I came to a beautiful enclosure, a quiet garden with gleaming white marble columns, enclosing a circular scene. In the centre of the scene was a gushing fountain, the water spurting gently from a tall upright column of black marble inlaid with ornate wreaths of gold.
The fountain, surrounded by sea-nymphs, of gleaming dark-green marble, protectors of the sublime. Each cherubim arising from the water in the fountain held a golden, curved conch like a trumpet to its lips, spurting water into the rippling wellspring of the fountain, sprays of fine water-mist all around.
Golestan, the garden of paradise. In this Persian garden, I knew I had arrived at a sublime source of peace and wisdom, a slice of bliss-delight, a pleasure dome of the serene.
Here, I sat down and closed my eyes. I swam into a waking dream, where the only sound was the water, the spray of the fountain’s water-mist, foaming, spurting, gushing into the rippling water below. And here I remembered the lines from a poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, as I drifted in and out:
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
I was still breathing here among the water, among these sea-nymphs wreathed from an Odyssey on the Aegean sea, brought back by the emperor Cyrus with the Persian fleet, to sing their song among the waves. But now, in the water, I heard the sweetness of their melodious song. The sirens sang to me now, promising me awareness, feelings of the sublime, enchanting me into a shipwreck, in a dream from which I would never wake.
I swam back to shore, and I opened my eyes. I was still here, after all these years, in this life, in this beautiful dream. No human voice would wake me yet, I would not yet drown. In this quiet corner of paradise, in a waking dream, among the water, I had heard the sirens’ song. And “once he hears to his heart's content, sails on, a wiser man”.
By now, the summer heat had risen to burn. I splashed some water from the fountain on my face and neck and carried on.
I now slowly wound down the path downhill, walking through the wide boulevards, down to the corniche, by the Caspian sea.
Here, oil was discovered. It gave wealth to the city, and the citizens were given freedom:
“Baku is a city founded upon oil, for to its inexhaustible founts of naphtha it owes its very existence, its maintenance, its prosperity... At present Baku produces one-fifth of the oil that is used in the world, and the immense output in crude petroleum from this single city far surpasses that in any other district where oil is found. Verily, the words of the Scriptures find illustration here: 'the rock poured me out rivers of oil. Oil is in the air one breathes, in one's nostrils, in one's eyes, in the water of the morning bath (though not in the drinking water, for that is brought in bottles from distant mineral springs), in one's starched linen – everywhere. This is the impression one carries away from Baku, and it is certainly true in the environs.”
Professor A. V. Williams Jackson of Columbia University, From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam (1911), wrote about the rapid population growth of Baku at the beginning of the 20th Century. Still, for all its affluence, Baku is a quiet place.
I now walked the long, circular open boulevard, along the banks of the Caspian sea. The corniche along the lake wound its way along the waterside path.
I looked up at the summer sun. City of flames, the blazing sunlight shining right through me, light-flares hotter than fire. In the swelter of heat, I stood still, sweat draining out of me. Baked in Baku, burned by fire. The lake a blur, sweat running into my eyes.
The skin melted from my bones like wax from a candle. But my flame would flicker on. Nothing could extinguish the light from my candle now, nothing and no-one could put it out.
I was stronger than I had ever been. Adapted to the world and all of its challenges in any environment that I could find myself in, I could assimilate anywhere, with confidence, power and knowledge, and walk free and proud. My mind was clear, reasonable and aware. I was grounded in the world itself, and I was afraid of nothing.
In the distance the flame towers flickered like a promise. The flame towers, icons of the modern Azerbaijan, its movement towards a futuristic glitz, are enormous glass skyscrapers, curved like a lotus flower, rising high into the skies on an open ascent in the distance. At night, they glow with fire, illuminating the city night.
The path kept on, as I moved to the end of the horizon, where I would begin my ascent to the Flame Towers above. Yet here at the bottom, I came across a beautiful, narrow canal of turquoise green water. Some gondolas floated by, propelled gently by electric motors, carrying wealthy Arab tourists. The boatman holding out a turquoise green umbrella, protecting himself from the sun, drifting slowly out of view.
Time to ascend to the flame towers, I was lifted by the cable-car to the top. I entered the tower. An old friend wrote to me once, telling me there was a cocktail bar there at the top. But I walked in, and found no cocktail bar here, just the swanky Fairmont hotel, where wealthy businessmen strode purposefully past, going nowhere. I exited the flame towers almost as quickly as I had entered this cocoon, empty of love.
I now walked across to the view of the city skyline, and here I stood at the edge of the open panorama. High above the world, I could see the Caspian lake beneath and the whole city stretching out below, far into the distance. Like a bird in the sky, I could see the immense world spread out beneath my wings.
And standing here, in this waking dream, at this vantage point above the city of winds, I closed my eyes.
I saw you there, standing on the Caspian Lake. You were bathed in a sea of flames. Black gold flowing from your mouth, black oil flowing down into the lake, glittering in the shimmering sunlight, spreading out into a circle around you, at the centre of the world, threatening to burst into an explosion of fire. You walked on the water, towards me, staring, unable to move.
I tried to reach out and touch you but I could not, like a patient etherised upon a table, looking out at the gathering skies as the evening spread out against the sky. This wasteland was ablaze with a million fragmented memories, free at last and open to all the energy of a fractured infinity.
Dream on, fade to black and then awake.
Read on for the next chapter via the home page, as we are about to enter our journey together to - JORDAN......