Children of the devil

"I don't despair. As to suffering-oh, yes, i know all about that! You are surprised that i should be unhappy when i can dance and am so sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that are deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sisters. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?"

"Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are unhappy children. We have falled out of the nature and hang suspended in space. And that reminds me of something. In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you about, there is something to the effect that is only a fancy of his to believe that he has one soul, or two, that he is made up of one or two personalities, Every human being, it says consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls"

"I like that very much," cried Hermine. "In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dance is scarcely half a day old. It is he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is."

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

Last command

"You like me", she went on, "for the reason I said before, because I have broken through your isolation. I have caught you from the very gates of hell and wakened you to new life. But I want more from you - much more. I want to make you fall in love with me. No, don't interrupt me. Let me speak. You like me very much. I can see that. And you are grateful to me. But you are not in love with me. I mean to make you fall in love with me, and it is part of my calling. It is my living to be able to make men fall in love with me. But mind this, I don't do it because I find you exactly captivating. I am as little in love with me as you as you with me. But I need you as you do me. You need me now, for the moment, because you are desperate. You are dying just for the lack of a push to  throw you into the water and bring you to life again. You need me to teach you to dance and to laugh and to live. But I need you not today-later, for something very important and beautiful too. When you are in love with me I will give you my last command and you will obey it, and it will be the better for both of us."

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

It reminds me Johnnie Walker, one of the characters of "Kafka on the Shore".

ThouSands

ThouSands! :)

Taste of Boston

And; here i am;



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And a nice quote from "Steppenwolf";

"The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent, He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek."

Re-engineering the brain

http://www.ted.com/talks/gero_miesenboeck.html

A nice talk!

Thinking, Obeying, and Seriousness

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”

"Obeying is like eating and drinking. There is nothing like it if you have been without it too long. Isn't it so, you are glad to do as i tell you?"

"Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason, i wished to be hundred years old. In eternity, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for joke."



Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

November 1st

Tonight is the night of the day that ends four years... I am tired a little bit. Maybe a lot.

Gardeners

I am glad that there are special people around me.

Pale Blue Dot

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Thanks Anas!

Sertao

Thanks Laura!

Random Access Memories

Yikim

"Yoksa, yikim, insanlarin ve inanclarin farkina varmadan degismesi anlamina mi geliyordu? Butun Istanbullular bir sabah sicak yataklarindan baska birer birey olarak kalktiklarini duslerdik; elbiselerini nasil giyeceklerini bilemiyorlar, minarelerinin neye yaradigini hatirlamiyorlardi. Belki de yikim, otekilerin ustunlugunu gorerek onlara benzemeye calismak demekti; o zaman bana Venedik'yeki hayatimdan bir parca anlattirir, sonra, buradaki tanidiklardan bazilarinin baslarinda sapkalar, ayaklarinda pantolonlarla benim anilarimi yeniden yasadiklarini duslerdik."

Beyaz Kale, Orhan Pamuk

Chekhov's Gun

"The stone itself is meaningless. This situation calls for something, and at this point in time it just happens to be this stone. Anton Chekhov put it best when he said, "If a piston appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired."
...
What Chechov was getting at is this: necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meanings, Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy. Logic, morals, or meanings don't have anything do with it. It's all a question of relationality. Chechov understood dramaturgy very well."

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

It is interesting see the statement of Chekhov's gun. A very similar issue exists in information theory, under the name of 'information criteria'. Roughly, an information criterion suggests us to remove unnecessary things as much as we can in a mathematical way.  It says that "What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist.", as in the quote. Beautiful.

Get Lucky

A good memory with Liz. Get Lucky.

Pregnant Silence

My Son, My girl, and My Angel,

I have checked; two years and four months have passed from the last letter, 'the moment'. How many letters am i far from you? Probably, you know the number.

If you ask where i am; i am still in Tampa. Sitting in a chair, listening the night. It is not raining here, now, but, somewhere around, there is storm.  The claps of lightnings, the song of tree crickets, and the rest is pregnant silence.

Thinking to tell someone leave. It is a grey area, maybe, even more complicated than it seems. It depends upon which side of it you are on. Yet, it does not change the act. We broke the bones and built walls. We are able to built the bones or break the walls. Indeed, what makes me think is that my excuse is always to make the things better. It smells selfishness? When did i start to do these things? Where did i learn it? I don't remember my son, my girl, and my angel.  Maybe, all it grows once you are at the edge of decision, once you have power, or once you start to afraid. Sound familiar?

Last year, I have met with two people. They are the moments from different worlds and different words. One of them has a very sweet daughter who likes ice creams and Ferrero Rocher. Who doesn't like? It reminds me days that i shared my chocolate with my nephew. Most delicious sin. I wish i could tell more about them. Frankly, remind me good things, but, make me vulnerable sometimes. People crosses each other's life. I remember others.

I just wanted to sleep in the couch now. By the way, the rain started and stopped, while i was writing. Wanted to let you know.

I will always love you my son, my girl, and my angel.

Impatience

I always learn something different when i go to Felicitous;

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

by Kafka

"There are two main human sins, from which all the other derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet, perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."

The Zurau Aphorisms by Kafka.

Thanks to Andrew.

The Door(s)

2012 Gaziantep, Turkey.

The Wall

"This is the Wall" says the Gatekeeper, slapping the broad side of the battlements. "Seven yards tall, circles the whole Town. Only birds can clear the Wall. No entrance or exit except this Gate. Long ago there was the East Gate, but they walled it up. You see these bricks? Nothing can dent them, not even a cannon."

The Gate keeper picks up a scrap of wood and expertly pares it down to tiny sliver.

"Watch this," he says. He runs the sliver of wood between the bricks. It hardly penetrates a fraction of an inch. He tosses the wood away, and draws the tips of his knife over the bricks. This produces an awful sound, but leaves not a mark. He examines his knife, then puts it away.

"This Wall has no mortar," the Gatekeeper states. "There is no need. The bricks fit perfect; not a hair-space between them. Nobody can put a dent in the Wall. And nobody can climb it. Because this Wall is perfect. So forget any ideas you have. Nobody leaves here."

The Gatekeeper lays a giant hand on my back.

"You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This where the world ends. Nowhere further to go."

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World By Haruki Murakami


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"I prefer being unfree, too. Up to a point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it's true- all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventh century. They're dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their castle, the Aborigines couldn't fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, string fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny the reality only at the risk being driven into the wilderness yourself."

Kafka on the Shore By Haruki Murakami

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"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on."

"The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" by Ursula K. Le Guin

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"Entrance not for Everybody." And: "For madmen only." I scrutinized the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic night might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little doorway give me admittance. There perhaps lay my desire, and there perhaps would my music be played.

The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off  in a deep twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway anywhere and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a smile I went on, giving it a friendly nod. "Sleep well. I will not awake you. The time will come when you will be pulled down and plastered with covetous advertisements. But for the present, there you stand beautiful and quiet as ever, and I love you for it."

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

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"The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distances. It was curious to think that the skye was the same for everybody, in Eurosia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think by who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!"

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell


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Here is what I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the house early in the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the chill. I find the driveway, my father's car, the walls, the threes, the rooftops, and the hills buried under a foot of snow. I smile. The sky is seamless, the snow so white my eyes burn. I shovel a handful of the fresh snow into mouth, listen to the muffled stillness broken only by the cawing of crows. I walk down the front steps, barefoot, and call for Hassan to come out and see."

From "The Kitten Runner", Khaled Hosseini

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"...By the time, she was thirteen, she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then, when April was fifteen, she took our father's shotgun and killed herself"

I hadn't expected that. I sucked in my breath, then felt my hand go up and cover my mouth.

"I know," said August. "It's terrible to hear something like that." She paused a moment. "When April died, something in May died, too. She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May's twin sister."

August's face was blending into the tree shadows, I slid up in my chair so I could still see her.

"Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest. Mother was good about taking care of her, but, when she died, it fell to me and June. We tried for years to get May some help. She saw doctors, but they didn't have any idea what to do with her except put her away. So June and I came up with this idea of wailing wall."

"A what kind of wall?"

"Wailing wall," she said again. "Like they have in Jerusalem." The Jewish people go there to mourn. It's a way for them to deal with their suffering. See, they write their prayers on scraps of paper and tuck them in the wall."

"And that's what May does?"

August noded. "All those bits of papers you see out there struck between the stones are things May 

has written down - all the heavy feelings she carries around. It seems like the only thing that helps her."

I looked in the direction of the wall, invisible now in the darkness. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angles dead.

"Poor May," I said.

"Yes," said August. "Poor May." And we sat in the sorrow for a while, until the mosquitoes collected around us and chased us indoors. "

From "The Secret Life of Bees", Sue Monk Kidd

What if i say

What if i say, it is an April evening in the time,

A most spacious wind is blowing from you,

I am watching the bluest of the seas in you,

And, I am wandering the deepest forests in you.

I have picked off the flowers from you, never wither,

I have harvested the soil on you, blessed.

And, i have tasted every kind of fruit in you.

What if i say, for me; you are,

Something needed like air,

Sacred like bread,

And venerable like water

You are a blessing... You are a blessing...

What if i say,

Believe me, my dear, believe me,

You are the rejoice in my home, spring in my garden,

the oldest wine on my table.

I am living in you,

You are prevailing in me.

Leave me to say your beauty,

Together with winds, rivers and birds.

Many days later, one day

If you cannot hear my voice,

From the voice of the winds, rivers and birds,

You'll know that I am dead.

But still, don’t grieve, 

In the grave, I’ll tell about your beauty to the tranquility.   

And later

When you hear my voice once again in the skies,

Just know, it is the last judgment day.

I am just out there in the crowd

Looking for you…

Cahit Sitki Taranci

It is a Turkish poem called "Desem ki"  from Cahit Sitki Taranci. (English translation by Emre and me.)

Tampa