A bitter-sweet homecoming

I've gone hunting through my Oxford thesaurus looking for a word that adequately describes the level of exhaustion I'm feeling right now. No word seems quite up to the task - burnt out, prostrated, enfeebled - all hint at this enervated feeling that's come over me but none can quite capture the absolute absence of energy - physical, spiritual, linguistic, creative, hermeneutic. It's as if my interior existence has crossed the event-horizon of a micro-black hole residing somewhere in my gut, a stygian afterworld where all light, every spark of inspiration gets sucked in and demolished, shredded and savagely stripped of all meaning and context.

Not the homecoming I was expecting.

Istanbul is a bit gloomy these days, washed over by a light reminiscent of Munch's Oslofjord in the Scream - grey, lustreless, cold and metallic. Yesterday afternoon, the Golden Horn could easily have been Munch's fillip - the "infinite scream passing through nature" - that led him to an existential implosion out of which emerged his most famous painting. The obvious irony must be an insult to Keroessa, the Golden Horn's namesake. I doubt any nymphs would dare its sullen waters now. Or maybe it's the nymphs themselves who are to blame: perhaps something's gone wrong in the pantheon; is it possible that a nymph has died and the Golden Horn weeps the loss of one of her maidens?

Whatever the cause, the effect is a dreary, downtrodden Istanbul, an Istanbul that only remembers its losses, that wallows in what is gone and will never be recovered. This Istanbul, this urban face, scowls at the world, spits rheumatic phlegm on cracked concrete and goes about its business with a prickly disregard for the World Out There.