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At the Edge of the Fire
In traditional Japan, when travelers stayed in a temple they were expected to perform some work like sweeping out their rooms and or sweeping up the garden or make a payment in some kind, even a verse or haiku
For a while, during the last years of last century, I stayed in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city on the edge. The City of Wind had been crowned most corrupt and most polluted city in the world, titles that may come and go, like Azerbaijan’s battles with its neighbour Armenia, but there are ways around everything when you are at such a precipice, and your principles are as fluid as dictatorships are. Baku was on the edge of just about everything a city could be on the edge of; politics, geography, history, of war, and erotically, in long summers where heat rose from nearly melted pavements, and young women’s shirts never quite reached their belly buttons, on the edge of the conservative society it was reputed to be.
But we understood each other, Baku and I. There are many, I think, who can guess what I mean: I have heard a few say similar about New York, Bangkok, or London, Paris, or Barcelona, Naples, Medellin in Colombia, Lviv, and Odesa in Ukraine and Beirut, in Lebanon. In these days of the hippy trail, it was Kabul, Teh’ran, Marrakesh…
