worshipper of fire: in the mevlana museum

in the dim museum the music of the ney drips thick like honey. the wood floors creak.

the first thing you see is calligraphy on the back walls, the whole number ratios in the broad brush strokes, black writing above the heads of people. below, smaller pieces in evenly spaced frames.

the crowds come through in waves. some moments it is packed, other moments less so. in one of the quieter moments a woman unzips a prayer book and reads from it. a man softly chants. men and women hold their palms up and rub their faces.

there are stone coffins marked with stone turbans. melvana's tomb is the most decorated, with gold paint thickly applied over green and blue. i recognize the style from the plates in the ceramic workshop. there is a geometric basis to the pattern but the geometry comes from flowers and and leaves. so they are not perfect lines and shapes: and there is a wobble in the black outlines. this is the kind of wobble that would make me toss such a drawing of my own and not try it again. it is bright gold on dark, all up and down the arches and inside the dome.

there is a huge copper bowl, with patterns in bright and dark silver, used to collect april rain. there is a chandelier of glass with a single green stone in its centre.

there are flutes, stringed instruments with long thin necks and tinny strings, little drums, a twelve-stringed violin. under glass, rumi's cloak and his camelhair hat, its shape gone now. there are carpets and prayer mats, and a rosary with nine hundred and ninety beads of black wood on a rope.

glass vessels hang low from copper rods, chains, wires.

there are books. there is a huge, stark, imposing koran done in black ink, decorated with blue and gold lines, mostly empty space.

there an original volume of rumi's couplets, script on decorated pages.

there are the lines:

come and come again.
whoever or whatever you are,
heathen, worshipper of fire,
sinful of idolatry, come,
even if you have broken your penitence a hundred times.
ours is not the portal of despair and misery: come.

many people praying inside including one my age in a white hat and beard seen to pray longest and closest to the front: made me uncomfortable. i wonder if he blogs.

the last thing before you leave is a small globe under glass depicting what looks like the movements of celestial bodies. circles, ellipses, azimuths, ascensions traced in thin black lines on a polished orange wood sphere. then out into the sun where it is bright.