Magus - Bozcaada - Fowles

Magus - a novel by John Fowles - is my favorite book. There are so many elements in it that I like. It is the book for instance which made me question the "realness" of things around me in the most surprising manner: One night reading the book, I must have fallen asleep for a couple of hours to wake up in the middle of the night. I walked to the fridge in the kitchen - a reflex by me -, opened the door, looked into it and then for at least 5 seconds there was a time where I couldn't tell whether what was happening at that moment was real or not. I'm not talking about a case where you would merely try to tell, what you encounter is a dream or not. It was that coupled with: "Suppose this fridge is real; but the way I perceive the feta cheese in it - it doesn't feel real at all. Maybe the fridge is real but the cheese is a set up."

Bullshit in the end - but this is what this book does to you. It shakes your sense of reality - strongly, subtly and in a very smart, intelligent way.


Another thing that stroke me right away was that it was set on an imaginary Greek island - Phraxos (means "fenced") which Fowles created based on this experience in the Greek island of Spetsai. While the atmosphere he describes establishes the perfect background for his mind game, the way he explains the atmosphere in these islands is simply magic - particularly for someone like me with strong ties to one particular island in the very same Aegean sea: Bozcaada (Tenedos in Greek).




Now after maybe 7-8 years, I have returned to this book, this time reading its English original. How different it feels when compared to reading its Turkish translation! And how different the book feels after all the experiences I had in my last decade. 


Anyway, this is how he describes his experience in Spetsai in his introduction for Magus:


"...No writer will happily disclose the deeper biographical influences of his work, which are seldom those of outward date and occupation and I am no exception. But my island of Phraxos (the "fenced" island) was the real Greek island of Spetsai, where I taught in 1951 and 1952 at a boarding school... 

Away from its inhabited corner Spetsai was truly haunted, though by subtler - and more beautiful - ghosts than those I have created. Its pine-forest silences were uncanny, unlike those I have experienced anywhere else; like an eternally blank page waiting for a note or a word. They gave the most curious sense of timelessness and of incipient myth. In no place was it less likely that something would happen; yet somehow happening lay always poised. The genius loci was very similar indeed to that of Mallarme's finest poems of the unseen flight, of words defeated before inexpressible. I'm hard put to convey the importance of this experience for me as a writer. It imbued and marked me far more profoundly than any of my more social and physical memories of the place. I already knew I was a permanent exile from many aspects of English society, but a novelist has to enter deeper exiles still.
...
"

I was going to write an entry about Bozcaada but I thought this paragraph above sums it all so perfectly that it will hold the need for a while. 


May you rest in peace, John, my man.

Naked side of Bozcaada as seen through my eyes during a winter storm - 5-6 years ago. Overlooking to Ayana bay.

My Answer to Life

After a year, which wasn't particularly good, I thought I could treat myself with bit of self spoilage. Ladies and Gentlemen, here is my new view at 5 in the morning with that magic orange tree in my block's garden; with its oranges making me remember about life's beauty - with its ups and downs.

What Genius Sounds Like

It seems Fazil Say did it again.


He took this classical Turkish song from 18th. century (one of my favorites),...



to turn into this brilliant jazz piece:

How To Fish A Cat - A National Geographic Documentary

It's one of the many  interesting things about my new apartment block. We share the block with cats. They are allowed to enter the building as they wish, live there as long as they want. While feeding the stray cats is a common habit in this city - as matter  of fact it's an essential part of Istanbul's culture - I must admit I had never seen this nice tradition being taken to this extreme.


Anyway - I like cats; so no big deal despite the smell in the block.


Today, one of these cats sneaked into my apartment and found her way to my extremely small laundry room which has a corner in its end where a cat can perfectly fit in without being reached by any human being. 


At first I tried for many minutes to convince the extremely anxious cat to come out using my most charming voice to not much luck until the point I realized that the whole scene must be looking extremely bizarre. So I initiated the execution of plan B.

Right after this pic was taken, she ran back to her corner. Flashlight scared her a lot.





I went to the corner shop to get some frozen turkey döner. Here is what happened next:

Good bye Miss Cat. 

Nayu - Gevende

This song's lyrics are in Turkish but every single word is sung backwards giving the impression that it is written in a totally different language. Nayu - the title - actually stands for Uyan - meaning "Wake Up".

Amazing...

About Morality

Is it possible that we created moral rules to only increase predictability in human behavior? We wanted to feel safe and for that we sacrificed on our own freedom for only to have a higher predictability on how other people would act under different conditions.


As Maslow's pyramid suggests, reaching a sense of safety has always been a top priority for us. Fear as it seems to me is the very base upon which we built our existence. In a sense fear is sister to existence or better to say fear is the anti existence. Because the moment we start to exist, we are born with a desire to survive, with a fear of not existing, of dying.





This base of fear diffuses to all parts of our developing lives - slowly and subtly. Also to our social relationships. We fear each other and this fear makes us to do the most stupid things.


I think Rumi had it all right (I hope he is - as these 4 lines sum up my life philosophy):


Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. 
Don’t try to see through the distances. 
That’s not for human beings. 
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.


Instead of negotiating with and trying to understand what being a human is all about, to deal with the fear, we have been choosing the much easier path. We created rules to imprison ourselves and others; reference points where we could align human behavior to. But these very rules sometimes make us alienate ourselves.





Why I wrote is a duel scene I saw in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. You see - until only couple of centuries ago, it was morally wrong to kill someone unless you invited the person to a duel. How graceful hypocrisy can get - eh?

Re-thinking History

In this post, I had tried to describe a fundamental problem that I have been observing in us - the mankind where I attempted to explain how under the information bombardment of today, we sometimes tend to fall into the trap of not thinking and not questioning.


"..Especially in our age of communication, when I see how some thought patterns are prepared, packaged into easy to swallow thought tablettes to be consumed by public and served through public opinion channels worldwide is somewhat disappointing.


It's like these radioactive marker drugs they inject into your vein to see how your blood travels through your body; a thought is created and you see it travel from continent to continent, from country to country, from city to city, from neighborhood to neighborhood for years - without being questioned, without being re-thought, accepted as they arrive, used with confidence and pride in every intellectual conversation."


Ironically, technologies we used to create this environment are taking their roots without any exception from science and the idea of continuous questioning behind it. Yet, while science's products reach more and more people thanks to our consumption cycles, the philosophy behind it becomes more and more isolated to ever shrinking, privileged oligarchic structures.


In any second, pre-processed information is flowing from all around the world right to wherever we are in such quantity and frequency that we barely find the time to even only consume them. We rely on people who think for us, people who sum it all up and tell us what we should think about things.




We don't even need to go 20 years back in time to see how fundamentally amount of information we receive and share on a daily basis has increased. We tweet, we facebook, we google, we cnn, we bbc; we do many things to collect facts from and distribute to the world. Yet these "facts" are mostly products of a perception and rarely just simple facts. They are processed and prepared by individuals with an established paradigm to be served for the hunger of our already established perceptions.


Perceptions or paradigms more in general seem to have their own appetite. Just like we tend to favor a pizza as compared to celery, our paradigms seem to hunger for certain kind of information, certain kind of factual looking comments, not just the facts. Because, the idea is not to eat something good for our health and feel good in longer terms; the idea is to reach satisfaction as fast as possible through holding the hot, crispy crust and melted mozzarella. And today's information bombardment mostly plays on our need for junk food. Not on our civilization's health.


Come to think of it, none of the wars were caused by celery but almost all of them were caused by pizza.


We think we are talking about facts. But truth is we talk about someone else's truths. We fail to recognize how deceitful facts can be.


I truly believe that human kind is more open to influence than we think. I believe we tend to think human beings in general are close to influence so we find it easier (and more profitable for some of us) to milk them instead of trying to change them. Yet, mostly the problem arises only because we don't prepare environments to allow people's exposure to different ideas.


That's why, one of the three potential social responsibility (Like many other things, this phrase has been exploited so much for the sake of brand identities that it sounds miserably corporate) topics that I would want to work on in the future is improvement of the quality of social sciences education at primary and secondary schools.


Particularly in the context of history teaching, I have been trying to follow new developments. I'm happy to see that there are waves of improvement in many countries where the history books are being revised and much more importantly children are taught how to reason. Yet the efforts put are very slow and very small in their effects when compared with the realities out. Because mostly the books they are based on, the traditional history writing in short, is crippled.


A quite old article written by Stefanos Yerasimos (RIP) - a Greko-Turkish historian - had served as a great mind opener for me. In that particular article, we was mentioning how in history writing, events are used as an, what he calls, "Argument Library" where some historians tend to select arguments from this library to support THEIR VIEW they had ALREADY established and omit the rest sometimes to severely cripple the soul of mankind.






Like every fundamentalism, nationalism has its echo, its even more irrational anti thesis. So as long as there is no global effort to revolutionize our education systems, we will keep failing.


But when we are doing this, I doubt it that rationalism alone could help us out:


In the biographical documentary named "The Fog of War", Robert McNamara (US Secretary for Foreign Affairs during bloodiest Vietnam war days) tells us about 11 lessons he had extracted from his long life. And one of the most important one goes; "Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us."


The reason why I wrote all of these is actually remembering about this favorite paragraph of mine from Charlie Chaplin's wonderful autobiography (My Autobiography, Charlie Chaplin):





"...His (Eisenstein's) film Ivan the Terrible, which I saw after the second World war, was the acme of all historical pictures. He dealt with history poetically - an excellent way of dealing with it. When I realized how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my skepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books..."


Granted, I never could manage to like "Ivan The Terrible" and to deal with history and with today's events for that matter poetically sounds naive but Chaplin surely has a point. I wonder how he would have felt in today's world.


Of course, writing History and getting informed about today's actual realities are two different disciplines. But I think these two disciplines are affecting and feeding each other where particularly the latter one feeds the former one. I think in a way, set paradigms of today establishes the framework of history writing of tomorrow.