The Road Leading Back to Damascus

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Tuesday, I wake up early In De-ez-Zur and begin my drive to Damascus, where I will return the hire car. The drive across the desert is mostly uneventful. I stop and turn to see a site called Quasir Al Shaqi, an old Ummayed palace from the 8th century in the middle of the desert .

You cannot miss the signs on the highway, but then going into the town, it is absolute confusion, where the signs just stop. I stop, ask a boy and he gets in and shows me the way, twisting and turning, until he says to go straight along this road. He wants some money and I give him a little bit and then go off down the road.

Later on, I pick up an older Kurdish guy hitching, who shows me which way to go, basically, we take two rights, and there are no signs at all on the way! Finally, after a half hour, I get there and it is just a big old fortress which is falling down. There is a tour bus there when I get there and then they leave and I am all alone. I have a quick look and then leave again soon. I was expecting some kind of oasis actually... but it is absolute desert all around!

I get back on the main highway and go into the Talila reserve, which is said to be one of the few places where the natural environment is protected in Syria. A man opens the gate to the reserve and I drive past the empty fairground and I am again, the only one here! I keep driving towards the "wild animals" and finally get to a station, some bigger gates and meet a man who tells me I can go look at the wild gazelles which are grazing behind the fence and I also climb up the quite big outlook tower.

It is interesting to see how the area behind the fence is much lusher than the ungated terriorty. Desert is very easily eaten up by domesticated and wild animals I suppose. I read in my guide book, that they say that it will take another 30 years for this environment to return back to its natural state (whenever that was previously possible is anyone's guess!)

I have a quick lunch in Palmyra and then am off again. I see ahead of me on the side of the road a large ute like vehicle with this huge machine gun mounted on the tray, above the cab and a solider who puts out of his palm! I wave at him, rather than stopping... and wave to all the other guys on the side of the road who are waving jollyly to me as well!

I am a bit freaked out... I realise a bit late, that this was a check point, and he was asking me to stop! A part of me just doesn't trust anyone alone with that kind of gun on their vehicle. I noticed later the the soldier in the rear view miror is somewhat bemused and so am a bit relieved! As the last thing I would want is one of those vehicles chasing me down the highway!

I get into Damascus in the late afternoon and brave the traffic once again. When I get into the centre of town, I ask a taxi driver to escort me to my hotel, as it would take a long time to find it otherwise.

I am relieved to drop off the car and I am pleased to finally be in Damascus. I have a very favourable impression of the city. Being the oldest continually inhabited city in human history, there is something very solid about it.

The next day is spent walking around the old city mostly... the souqs and checking out the Mosque, which is actually very impressive. I don't have any of that feeling I have in the mosque I had in Aleppo and it is a place where people gather and honestly come to reflect and pray. Children love the place, and are racing around and playing at full volume.

I also go into this old house, which was the home of one of the big whigs during the Ottoman empires reign... it is interesting enough, with strange mannequins in a lot of the rooms showing how the people used to live and what they used to look like.

But really, for me, most of Damascus I have seen before in other places in Syria, it is the same sort of thing, only more highly compressed. So now, at least, I feel I have got a good grip on what Syria is like.

So I sit down to rest at one point and a man comes up and talks to me, I am a little wary, as I think he may be trying to sell me something or be my guide or whatever, but it turns out he just wants to talk.

He is on military service, but originally comes from Lattakia, a coastal city some distance Apamea I didn't really have time to check out.

He is a young man, clearly intelligent, wearing western clothes and very open and gentle in his countenance.

We talk about my travels, where I have been and how I have experienced this country and so on.

We talk about his military service, he is apparently just working in the textile department, and is enjoying it, because working in textiles is his normal job.

I ask about homosexuals in the army. He says... well, every army has men dressed as women, including the Syrian army. And homosexuality is a phenomen known to be more common in the army than in regular life. He said, if they are found out at all, they are thrown out of the army and basically negatively branded for life, to the point where any sense of movement in their life is impossible!

I asked him about homosexuality in Syria in general and he said, it just wasn't something that happened. The stigma was too big. It was just not acceptable behaviour.

I noted to him, how here men are often found holding hands in the street and being very affectionate to each other. And how that kind of behaviour between heterosexual men just does not happen in Australia, as that kind of affection implies homosexuality. Only very recently, have I noticed a shift in this...

And two men in Australia holding hands in the street COULD ONLY imply that they were crusaders of the homosexual cause! He found this very, very amusing, as men holding hands in Syria ONLY implies that the men are good friends - nothing else!

I asked about heterosexuality in Syria, and he said what I had heard before, that every man is expected to find a wife and get married. He said also, what he looked for in a woman mostly was her ability to be a good mother and wife.

I asked if men and women ever slept with other men or women before marriage. He said no. He would only marry a woman who was a virgin when he met her and that he could not marry a woman who slept around or even with one man! He said he thought that would mean that she would be a poor parent!

I said, Swedish girls noticably seem to sleep around a lot before they get married, and that is culturally accepted there and that there is no evidence or sign, this makes them lesser parents. I said, I said in many ways, Sweden is the most humane and civil society I had ever been to.

So I said to him, did he think that in the coming years, would a sexual revolution, like the one the west experienced in the 60's, where it came to pass that men and women decided it was not necessary to be married to engage in sexual intercourse ever occur in Syria?

I said, I had recently been to South Korea and that South Koreans are now experiencing their version of the sexual revolution, where young people are deciding it is acceptable and normal to have sexual relations outside of marriage.

He said he thought so, that it was perhaps inevitable...maybe in 10 or 20 years.

We are about to get onto some really interesting territory when his phone rings and he turns it off. Then it rings again, and he says he has to go, he is being called back, and so we exchange good byes and he leaves.

It is all very interesting... it is funny, as I was taking the bus on the way into Syria I began writing all this material about marriage.

I related marriage to a construct of religion. St Paul (who was on his way to Damascus to persecute the christians, when he had a vision of Jesus!) said that, the man should marry if he must, because it is better for him to marry than burn! Whether he means in lust or in hell is not quite clear, but it is clear that the two are synonymous!

Of course, animals often remain in mating pairs for their whole life time... and perhaps in a basic sense, marriage is the natural order of things. But we are not just animals either and are much more social creatures, who do appear to have higher function rather than just breeding!

My friend said in Syria, divorce was seen as being unthinkable, and it is so clear that so much damage is done to the children when this happens. I said that divorce in the west seemed to indicate to me that people seemed to outgrow one another. All of what I have seen, indicates that human beings seems to naturally grow with different people related to where they are at in different parts of their life.

Recently, I read about the Elizabeth Taylor of the Egyptian pop world, who married 18 times! That is of course, making a mockery of marriage as being to one and only one person for your entire life. But these mutants like Elizabeth Taylor and indeed so many people in our society seem to demonstrate that one person till death do us part does not work for a lot of people. We can say, well, it is they who are at fault for not making it work.

I have come to the conclusion, that of course each of us is different and it seems to me that the mistake we make is looking or expecting to find this perfect person for us for all time. But the perfect person for us in any given time in our lives seems to be entirely different.

What I tend to think, and what I experience, is that being in relationship enables you to be in relationship. That if we took a more serious view of relationship as being a sphere of self development, rather than an end in itself. it would enable us to grow more in relationship and I think, for women and men, if what they want is a traditional family, find the right person for them to whom they would be able to be together with for perhaps the rest of their lives. I think many don't seem to find that person or choose the wrong person, perhaps because they are not dedicated to self development in relationship that would enable them to attract and find the right person for them!

Another factor that interests me, is that as we are entering into a global culture, I think there is so many more people available to us... rather than a few people in the same village of around the same age, who would be suitable for us. That is somewhat incestuos behaviour, which genetically, I think creates inbreeding.

I mean, in cooking, you add flour and flour, you get flour, but if you add a flour and egg you get something entirely new. Life seems to like this sort of creative diversity. Traditionally, you are often expected to marry within the clan, but I think this is changing a lot recently.

And I think this is related to genetically, humanity truly becoming interconnected, not cuturally separated and compartmentalised. I don't think life wants everyone to marry within their tribe or group - that kind of world would be very boring I think.

And I think part of this, is being useful to oneself and others, and in some sense, being able to love oneself and others, and be able to grow and facilitate the growth of others.

I would love to be with a syrian woman, not just for one night, or even for a few weeks, maybe even for some months or years...maybe even the rest of my life. Maybe I would like to have a wife in every country... and that she would have a husband in every country as well... wouldn't that be quite an expanded world?

Bear with me on this one... of course its not practical or really very possible now... but this kind of view somehow liberates from the isolationism of this enclosed coupled marrige-dom, this would be a world where relationship would be given a high credence, even the number one priority.

But I don't believe in this idea of belonging or ownership... that is not freedom. And I don't think unintelligent permissiveness is intelligent or respectful either. I think there is real meaning and importance to our relatings and if we were able to see this and act on the basis of it, the world would be a much more interesting place.

I think if women were revealed in a stable place in her true dominion (not just the home, but in society), rather than quite obviously hidden as is the case here in Syria, she would be at home in society, be stable in it as home and so be supported enough that she would not be seeking so much this "husband as security."

Both men and woman I think, want to love other men and women freely, ultimately, and ultimately I don't think that this love always has to be sexual and this where we find ourselves locked in and dependant on the physical, when actually the most fullfilling relating and being with others is always non-physical, and I think that is the case even in love making. But such love is usually, in most societies, deemed to be only able to occur between two married people - a man and a woman.

So, we live in a society, which is yet to realise the living nature of relationship, the emotions and actual true basis for what we are beyond "the mind."

Indigenous people's instinctually take these things a lot more seriously than us and often base their societies around inner realities (collective and individual) and so did the white people many thousands of years!

I think the true feminist cause now is to bring these realities to the forefront of human society, so they are recognised and brought to bear in a real way. It is maybe mostly women who can liberate men and women from this sexual knot which ties us to the grosses level of the physical and prevents us partaking of heaven, here on earth.

Funny, I am ruminating on all this, in what is often called the "chastity capital" of the world!

Of course, the religions represent perhaps the greatest obstacles to people actually realising that... they all say heaven is not available here on earth. Which many of us know is not true.

In the book "One River" I am reading, a young female missionary says about her Experience with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico.

"Once I tried to explain heaven to a young woman," she said Smiling as she poured Schultes a cup of tea. "I said it was a beautful place, a place where there are no tears. She asked me wether I had been there. I said no. I explained that only the dead could know heaven. Then she looked at me with the saddest face. She said she was so sorry for me. And she left almost in tears."
"How strange," Schultes said.
"It was only later I realised that most Mazatec actually claim to have been to heaven."
"With the mushrooms?"
"Yes. They believe Jesus speaks through the mushrooms, that their visions are messages from God."