years ago in the deserts of turkistan

But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she’d get lost in the successive and round emptinesses inside her

Oddly enough, birds and supranatural beings are precisely what one encounters when one ventures to the site of Sultana’s pilgrimage. I decided to investigate the site myself on a visit to Morocco in 1997. The spring, with its attendant saint’s tomb, is a fascinating place. Sidi Slimane is located in the heart of the Middle Atlas. […] But what makes the site so interesting is its spiritual heterosexuality. As one wanders up a hill toward the sanctuary of Sidi Slimane, one crosses beautiful Moroccan countryside. A river flows below the sanctuary, and cats dot the walkway to the famous tomb. But Sidi Slimane’s tomb is not alone here: next to his mausoleum lies the tomb of the female Lalla (Saint) ‘A’isha al-Sudanniya. According to local lore, she liked to stay in caves by the water and was a female spirit. Sidi Slimane himself supposedly controlled birds and jinn. The entire location in which this male-female saintly couple operates functions as a pilgrimage site for the area. Lalla ‘A’isha may come out at night and is said to visit individuals who choose to spend the night at the site. I was told that this was not her grave but simply here “place.” Historically, she is said to have been a contemporary of Sidi Slimane. The spring emanates from the second cave, where Sidi Slimane himself lived.

"In Sound, I remember just one specialist, a pale, dark-haired Latin scholar, who rocked continuously in his chair whenever he read us onomopoetic phrases he had found among the classics. The murmuring of innumerable bees in immemorial elms; l'insecte nette gratte la secheresse. Fairly late in the semester, when we were asked what our papers were going to be about, this young man said he wanted to write about the sound of corpses floating through literature. Oh, the professor said, with some enthusiasm, after just a moment's hesitation, you mean Ophelia. No, the young man replied, I want the sound of the sea."

Remnants—that word floats up in my mind as we leave the mosque and walk towards the home of the last Armenian in Everek, the old Armenian Quarter of the town of Develi. He died in 2000 and left the property to his nephew in Istanbul. We peer in the windows at the dusty rooms of a once-grand house. These buildings are remnants, and we are remnants, like scraps of fabric from a torn curtain. We are searching for ghosts, and we ourselves are ghosts come to haunt this land.