2018 FEB 7, CASABLANCA, MOROCCO
It was a chance encounter at the time of sunset that brought us to acquaint with Hassan II Mosque.
“Chance encounter” simply put - there was no intentional pursuit for the mosque. We happened to be walking along the coastline at Casablanca. We happened to face the southwest. We happened to be looking for the famous Rick’s Café, where every route of the “Casablanca” film pilgrimage converges. The Café happened to locates across the coastline. The coastline happened to face the sunset.
We stayed on the coastline for a long time - long enough that the resting seagulls had altered, for many times, their identities; long enough that the fallen night had started devouring the floating light particles; long enough that the sun had retreated from our dresses.
Stella suggested that we should move. “It’s getting cold.” She headed towards southwest.
The coastline was flooded with stone-made anchors. They constructed a geometrical safe space where wind, cats, and couples can hide themselves in. For the days ensued, I felt sorry for those foreign couples who were chased out from the piazza in front of Hassan II for kissing and hugging in public - they were not local enough to know about the hidden cave in between those coastline anchors. I’ve encountered some passionate kisses on the Piazza San Marco that made time froze with the morning dew, yet these hidden caves brought in a spell of romance that comes from the forbidden.
Then there came the mosque. Like how the naked man from De Chirico’s painting bumped into Andre Breton’s visual field, the mosque dropped itself into mine. It forced itself out of the layered clouds that were trying to devour the landscape, and stopped the action of death over there - as if Allah dropped it there. It crashed onto the earth, and then it crashed into our cerebral cortex that deals with visual signals. The clear air on the side of the mosque crashed into the layered clouds. Left out was the mosque. With a touch of sunset palette, it created something surreal.
Back then, I was not so sure about how I would describe the feeling of awe. I am not Muslim. I am an atheist. Yet the religious feeling of awe, mixed with some kind of ecstasy, landed upon me. I found an accurate description of that mixed feeling in “The Painted Veil”, by Maugham:
“The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star. Though on the river it was light so that you could discern palely the lines of the crowded junks and the thick forest of their masts, in front it was a shining wall the eye could not piece. But suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of colored wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic and unsubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.
The tears ran down Kitty’s face and she gazed, her hands clasped to her breast and her mouth, for she was breathless, open a little. She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty. She took it as the believer takes in his mouth the wafer which is God.
…
The hard light of midday had robbed the magic palace of its mystery and now it was no more than a temple on the city wall, garish and shabby, but because she had seen it once in such an ecstasy it was never again quite commonplace; and often at dawn or at dusk, and again at night, she found herself able to recapture something of that beauty.”
I’ve moved to Los Angeles for more than two years now, yet I only loved the city at the time of sunrise and sunset. Sunrise and sunset hours are rendered with some senses of ceremony, and a tip of religious contemplation. Maybe we love the sunrise and sunset for its ephemerality: after all, they are happenstance, not a continuing status. The birth is the death.
I paid the mosque two more visits during my stay at Casablanca. I’ve seen the famous openwork windows, the rooftop that opens up to catch light, the intricate mosaic that’s inherent to Islamic art, and the carefully sculpted interior wooden structures. Yet the mosque has never revealed to me again its sacredness.
And the sunset collected itself into the memories of December of 2017, awaiting its next life.