Art, Truth, and Politics

I walked through the cemetery looking left and right along the rows, trying to get a sense of the number of graves.

The freighter to the left is entering the Dardanelles. The Aegean is to the right.

I find the simplicity of the inscription quite moving.

I am curiously happy to see the Aegean this morning. Singing along with Abbey Road, thinking of bicycling in Europe in the 1970s, my impression of America’s promise then. Interesting conversation with a guide in Troia yesterday. He’s been in the business 40 years and says in the last three years Erdoğan has sunk Turkey’s tourist industry, that European and American tourists aren’t coming anymore, that almost all of what he sees are Asian tourists. I’ve noticed the absence of Americans also, outside the well-managed boutique promenades of Athens, Budapest, Split. There was only a single other American in all my language classes in Berlin. In the summers of the 1970s it seemed American teenagers and college students flocked to Europe. On the ferry this morning there were buses of Turkish students and Chinese tourists.

Singing along with Abbey Road: “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free!” seems deeply meaningful to me this morning, soon followed by “One and one and one is three,” which, while equally true, I think, seems opaque somehow, a seemingly simple truth hiding something esoteric, mystical.

The size of the painting on the mountain gives you a sense of the extent to which the peninsula is dominated by monuments related to WW I.