LETTER FROM TANGIER (AND CASABLANCA): 7/17/25

CATHOLIC YOUTH, A HOSTEL HOMO, ONE NEW PASSPORT, TWO DEAD POETS, AND WONDERING (STILL) WHAT THE MEASURE IS FOR ONE'S MEASURING UP

1.

“Sky cleared up, day turned to bright/Closing both eyes now the head filled with light/Hard to remember what a state I was in/Instant amnesia/Yang to the Yin …”

- George Harrison, from “Blow Away”, which was used on the soundtrack of the film, “Nuns on the Run”

In the first photo above, I am with the divine Amaima, who helps manage the hostel I had been living in this past week here in Tangier. The second photo is of Pattie Boyd, divine as always, at the opening of the Compass Point group show at Gallery Kent which features the work of Johnny Rozsa and Sarah Guppy and Stephenie Bergman. Pattie, a muse, was the wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton and is now married to British property developer Rod Weston. Divinity and muses and art. Such rarified air blows in here, yep, muse-like within the mixed-up breeze from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic where they conflate down there somewhere and wash too ashore in this place of mountain palaces and fortress walls and cliff dwellers who cling to an idée reçue about royalty and kingdoms because of a deeper belief in the nobility of family. Such air itself conflates with the ranker sort, an odor finally of menace and niceties and another something that seeps in like a dare there between them seeking a description that can account for its own sniffing about but not snidely, not quite, but not looking to quit either in this ether of kif and the Koran looked on too kindly and all this lovely boredom that can pass for Burroughs’s horny ghost. Incongruity, the constancy of its companionship, yet again makes itself known to me here in Tangier, the one more-than-one ingredient that has groomed me to be who I am as much as that Methodist minister did, the poor old sod camouflaged in Christianity and not enough cologne who molested me in Mississippi and began it all, this pilgrimage to find again the soul he stole from me and by his doing so proving … incongruously … I had one.

And do.

Still.

Somewhere.

Out here.

Not there.

2.

These two poets, Fanny Howe and Andrea Gibson, died this past week. I wanted to curate a couple of poems by them for my A POEM FOR A SUNDAY which goes out to our paid subscriber community - our secret Sunday service shared only between us - but the wifi at the hostel where I was staying for the last six days was down and it complicated my getting it done. I apologize. I wanted to acknowledge Howe and Gibson, however, so everyone is getting to read a couple of poems by them in this latest LETTER. I liked pairing these two photos of their looking at something we cannot see and imagining they are seeing the same thing but seeing it so differently it becomes for each something other than what the other sees. Maybe they are seeing their own death as the other’s. I do wonder if poets experience death differently because that is how they experience life.

THE ANGELS

by Fanny Howe

The lassitude of angels

is one thing

but how the gold got under

their skin I do not know

##

I met them

in the fields of Mourning

where there is no morning

##

only the end of night

the dull gold

of transforming suffering:

##

what is passed on -

as milk is pain -

passed on to those

we love, becoming

nourishment, good luck

for them

##

Some colors

imply an ease

with indirect experience:

In the Fields of Mourning

the point of each hour

is the dreams it inspires

##

and there

the angels hang out

limp and gold

but suddenly anxious

if told

##

what trembling joy

their suffering has brought.

#################

IN THE CHEMO ROOM, I WEAR MITTENS MADE OF ICE SO I DON’T LOSE MY FINGERNAILS. BUT I TOOK A RISK TODAY TO WRITE THIS DOWN.

by Andrea Gibson

Whenever I spend the day crying,

my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,

##

they finally understand me.

Even when the arena is empty, I thank god

##

for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me

only thanking god for the shots I make,

##

remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me

all my prayers were answered

##

the moment I started praying

for what I already have.

##

Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,

she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,

##

says there is something lovely about the woods.

I know how to build a survival shelter

##

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,

and pulled moss. I could survive forever

##

on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me

to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

##

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things

can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up

##

a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?

I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle

##

collection compared to my end goal. I would love

to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror

##

and mistake my head for the moon. My dark

thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away

##

from me believing them. I love this life,

I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope

##

so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom

I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.

##

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world

my disappointment? Why did I want to take

##

the world by storm when I could have taken it

by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers

##

on the side of the road where I broke down?

I’m not about to waste more time

##

spinning stories about how much time

I’m owed, but there is a man

##

who is usually here, who isn’t today.

I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know

##

his wife was made of so much hope

she looked like a firework above his chair.

##

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember

the people I love, or forget them?

##

Either way, please let me remember.

3.

The reason I moved into the hostel is that the friend who has so generously been letting me stay in her apartment came back into town for the annual Charity Plays Weekend here in Tangier and all the parties and lunches and dinners that led up to it during the week. This year - its tenth - the one-night-only production was Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I have written about it on assignment and am waiting to see if the story I have turned in passes muster and, if so, to read the edited version that is preferred. To be honorable, I’m holding off writing more about it here in my Substack column until that story is published.

In the midst of writing the story, I was living in that hostel but having to compose it all in cafes - another reason the poems didn’t get curated in time - because of there being no wifi. Living in my tiny single room there for such a week was quite - here we go again - incongruous. Each time before heading out to an event filled with fancy folk, I had to wait to take a shower in the shared bathroom and to hope there was still enough hot water. I got dressed up a bit in that room in which I could barely turn around. Then I’d come back later from the largeness of my life to the smallness of the room and all my smells lingering there and the never-ending noise right below my window in a tucked-away, trash-strewn corner of the Medina. By the third night, Friday, I had learned to fall sleep to the shouts of men engaging in the argumentative way that Moroccan men converse and the rumbling of motorcycles in the echoing narrowness of the byways and the screeching of children playing late into the night but was awakened yet again a bit after 4 a.m. by the louder echoes and rumblings, another kind of narrowness, exalted, expansive, of the calls to prayer broadcast around me from the many mosques rising around the kasbah as the sun too rose some place in the world, maybe here in this one, not a part of it but all the world some know.

I lay awake wanting to return to whatever dreams were dropping in on me and, as I waited through the invocations of Allah and all the oblatory else being vocally thrust upon the waning darkness, I contemplated my having been around so much worldly splendor and aesthetic beauty and decadence and talent and delight for the last few days and coming back to this and, now awake enough alas, worried about my imminently submitting a story about my own all else and awaiting its acceptance, mine. Amidst such aural aggression calling for a greater submission, those old dread sissy feelings from my poor orphaned Mississippi childhood surfaced: will I ever measure up and, if I finally do, will I feel that I have. The calls continued. Surrender - but not submission - was my only remedy. So I waited. I waited them out.

Earlier that day I had been allowed by director Rob Ashford to attend The Cherry Orchard’s dress rehearsal. That’s Rob above in the midst of directing Gillian Anderson who played Ranyevskaya and Michelle Dockery who played Varya.

Varya longed, like me, to be a pilgrim. If only she and I, like Gibson, had ever known how to build a survival shelter from fallen tree branches. Packed mud. Pulled moss.

There that night - bad pillow instead, “Allah,” buffeted about the Medina’s narrow lanes and dirtied stucco walls - I lay in my own longing that can limn the oddity of a pilgrim’s almost lonely life and remembered hers, her longing, not Gibson’s, Varya’s, and her lines about how it would feel to be one, a pilgrim, how Dockery delivered them. “I would walk and I’d walk … It would be bliss …”

“… such bliss …” I whispered beneath the call to prayer, not as a description of it but as an attempt to blot it out, to feel something else. “ … such …” then “…. bliss …” / “ … such …” then “bliss …”/ “… such” then …

Oh, fuck it.

I waited.

4.

I took these two photos in Casablanca on Tuesday where I had gone to get my new American passport at the US consulate there. These photos reminded me of America as well as my not being there anymore. When I arrived at the consulate, I was told I couldn’t enter with my computer, which was in my backpack, and would have to find a place “to dispose of it.” I walked around the corner to the inn where I had stayed a month ago when I was applying for the new passport and asked the lovely woman there if she remembered me. She smiled. “You are someone to be remembered,” she said. I smiled at that, returning hers. I told her of my predicament and offered her 100 dirham to keep my computer for me while I retrieved my new passport. She said not to worry, that she would be happy to watch it and no money was required to do so.

The consulate reserves two hours from 2 to 4 on Tuesdays and Thursdays for Americans in Morocco to pick up our passports without having to make an appointment after we are notified that it is there. So there was no waiting I had to endure this time as I did when I applied for it or when I lay in bed waiting for the first day’s call to prayer to cease after waking me. It was a speedy, easy process. It took all of five or ten minutes. But it was a long day of two-hour train rides back and forth to Casablanca from Tangier. The fast trains and the train stations are beautiful here. State of the art. But I tend to prove to myself that I can walk distances if they are an hour or less - it’s one of the ways I stay fit as I approach my 70th birthday - so I walked and I walked to and from both stations which ended up being around 4 hours of purposeful, justified meandering in the July Moroccan heat. I was exhausted when I got back to the hostel. I had left at 8:30 that morning and arrived back at a bit after 9:30 that night.

There was still no wifi.

I longed for a shower.

But there was now no water.

None.

I brushed my teeth using a bottle of it I had by my bed.

No noise could keep me from the sleep that beckoned.

The night before though, at around 2 a.m., the group of Catholic youth from Spain staying in the hostel - about a dozen of them in all the rooms but mine - began loudly singing their folk hymns in the communal outside kitchen located right above me on the patio while someone strummed a guitar which was punctuated with a kind of performative joy that punched at the fetid early morning air along with a jumble of hormonal Spanish. They had been asked not to make such noise late at night but it was proving to be of no avail.

Again, I lay awake knowing that in two hours Islam’s aggressive call would replace their Christian ones.

They were not bad kids. Indeed, there was goodness in them. They were on a mission to tend to babies in an orphanage here and work with the street boys - the thrown-aways - whom Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, include in their own mission work in the kasbah. It was puzzling to me though that they could have specific empathy for their charges but in general they seemed to have none for their neighbors in the Medina or the old man living with them in the hostel trying to get some sleep. They also tended to move about in a group, a blob of Christian charity, and took up even more concentrated space by doing so. They were overly chipper about their being overly charitable. A bit too chipper - and Lord God loud - for my tastes but I give youth a wide berth to be young. They played cards a lot. They all ate together each night making a shambles of the kitchen. They sang those songs sometimes incessantly. My theory is that if they had been just young people out for a bit of adventure on a trip to exotic Morocco across the way from their homes in Spain, they would be sneaking off to have sex quietly behind closed doors or searching for it out there in Tangier after smoking some kif. But they were high on their own supply, which just happened to be Christianity. And so I don’t think sex was in the offing. Therefore a lot of sublimation was taking place - cards, cooking, cranking out those songs. And there was a volume to it that matched their number.

One evening I told them I had walked the Camino, the Catholic spiritual path located in their country. Their eyes brightened. Suddenly I was not only someone else in those brightened eyes, but one of them. They gathered more closely around me in a semicircle wanting to hear of my experience walking such a path as a Christian pilgrim. Some of them even sat at my feet. “I am not a Catholic,” I began, “I was raised an austere Protestant. A Methodist. But I ceased to be a Christian on the Camino. That was my spiritual epiphany, the shock of what I believed.” Many of their faces fell. But some of them brightened even more with curiosity. “I just don’t think one religion has dominion over any other religion. It’s all the same tinkered-with narrative with different characters. God comes to earth in the form of a human and it always seems to be a man. I hate the gendering of God as male, too. I refer to God as They and Them because I think God is the ur-transgender entity. God is all of us. All genders. All. Everything. Everyone.”

There was now an unaccustomed silence emanating from them.

I continued.

“I also think that the internet is God’s turning the usual narrative on its head. In all the other narratives God tries to understand humanity by becoming human and having empathy for us but we always fuck it up. So I think God decided to allow us to invent the internet and thus experience omniscience and see if we can have empathy for God by being God-like. And now we’re fucking that up, too.”

“I like that,” one of the girls said.

“So, you’re not a Christian, huh,” said a boy.

“I believe in all the gods and goddesses - and God in all Their definitions,” I told him and thus them all. “I’m a theist. I took the ‘a’ from ‘atheist’ and pulled it apart from the rest of the word and live in the largeness of the smallness of that space between it and the rest of the word. There’s infinity inside it. I live in that mystery. I tinker around with that.”

Two days later - after I had complained about their singing and making such joyful noise at 2 a.m., Amaima’s boss, Moshin, spoke to them while I was away in Casablanca about being quieter after 10 p.m, as all the signs posted around the hostel tell its occupants to be. Upon my return, they gave me a wider berth myself. They barely engaged with me. The air between us itself seemed a bit more fetid with dislike, disapproval. Moshin, I assumed, had told them I had complained. What was not an assumption was the guilt I was suddenly feeling in their presence. Now I was a part of their fable, they no longer a part of mine. Guilt is embedded in all religions but especially in Catholicism. Guilt is its gift along with its charity. And I became the subject of their charitable mission along with those babies in that orphanage and the boys thrown away by their families on the Tangier streets. I was touched by guilt which they bestowed upon me but I stepped back into my own fable where it would not be my guide. My pilgrimage from Methodism to molestation to calls to prayer and Chekhov in Tangier has taught me that if nothing else.

Here is some of their performative joy below before they decided that guilt would be their gift to me. As I said, they were basically good kids. This is a song they kept repeating this particular day over and over which was newly created each time they sang it based on each name of each person in their group. This is what they came up for me, a pilgrim, as I ate my early dinner down below them one evening.

5.

Nick Ripatrazone wrote a remembrance of Fanny Howe at Literary Hub upon her death last week.

It began:

“My Irish mother used to say to me, ‘You’re a tinker. You make a little mess and move on.’”

I can’t help but think of Fanny Howe, gone at 84, through her mother’s perceptive words. Howe was a tinker, a mess-maker, an itinerant spirit.

Years after her mother’s observation, Howe remained drawn to the word, aware of its multiple meanings (both human and aviary):

Come, tinkers, among droves of acorn trees
Be only one third needful, O
Name the things whereby we hope
Before the story scatters.

Howe once described her friend, the poet Margo Lockwood, as “Catholic, mystical, modest, brilliant, biting and agnostic.” It was a perfect summation of Howe herself.

For Howe, the first and last words of that litany were inextricable, consistent. “I do think that atheism is the great ground for it all⁠,” she said, “that if you haven’t experienced atheism fully, you can’t grasp the shock of believing anything.”

Howe wrote, “I’d always been looking for a revelation that would open the whole universe for me and make it all have sense.” She’d “always felt sort of bereft in the world⁠—like, Why be here?”

6.

Andrea Gibson:

“The only thing in this life we have control over is where we put our attention.”

7.

“All things must pass
All things must pass away …”

- George Harrison

8.

Everything connects

9.

Onward …