Changing Photographs

Year 1999

Lots of food on the table. The house is decorated with cheesy, shining ornaments soaked in glitter. Smiling faces. Many faces. The little girl at the center, putting up her act, laughing because she knows she should smile when someone stands in front of her with a camera. Her brother is at the back, acting cool, displaying a crooked smile, anxious to get into the Santa Claus suit and surprise his little sister. Who they call "mom" is on the left, with tired eyes but a true smile. She's happy to be there and to have been able to cook the turkey in time for dinner. Her mother is sitting at the head of the table, with blue eyes and a sincere smile. She wishes her husband could be there, and puts her arm around her other, older daughter. She, the aunt of the children, makes sure there is no lipstick on her teeth and cuddles in with her mother. The uncle of the children and his wife are on the sides; they, too, are smiling. They wish their children, who have long left their nests and have started to build their own by themselves, could be there with them, like the old days. The father of the children, with the dark, black mustache is behind the camera; you can't see him, but you know he's there-smiling, and fidgeting with the camera. His mother is sitting next to his wife's mother, with her husband, who has grown old with her. Their eyes which have seen much, much more than anyone at the table glimmer with their small smiles. The two nieces of the grandmother are at the back, hugging each other; sisters, smiling pleasantly, happy to be together.

Year 2013

Lots of food on the table. The house has some ornaments hung up here and there, but you can see that they're out-of-date. Smiling faces. But not a lot of them. The father on the far left hand side, smiling, his black mustache now gone gray, sits next to his wife. She has tired eyes, and is glad she's managed to make everything she'd planned to make. She is smiling, her head cocked to the side, thinking of all those people who aren't there that last night of 2013. The little girl has become a teenager and is spending  new year's eve at home for the last time; she doesn't believe in Santa Claus anymore. She has just set the camera's timer and has raced to her designated spot; she's smiling, but she really wishes her brother could be there. Her brother, now 25, is off in some forgotten little town, serving the army, completing his compulsory army service. Their grandmother, on the mother side, is sitting at the head of the table on her own. Her smile has somewhat faded, she misses her husband and her older daughter who don't have an excuse for not being there, she has lost too much to a disgusting, dire, despairing disease. The grandmother on the father's side isn't there; she's gotten too old to climb the stairs to her son's apartment, and has chosen to spend her 95th new year's eve at home, alone. The uncle and his wife are in another town, with their children and grandchildren. The two nieces of the grandmother are at the back, hugging each other; sisters, smiling pleasantly, happy to be together. Everyone thinks of all the people who aren't there that night, especially the ones without excuses-tears well up in their eyes-they blink them away, because they know you're supposed to smile at the camera...

***

The one thing I don't like about new year's eve, exaggerated by profit-seeking entrepreneurs and foreign traditions, is that you get to- actually, you're forced to- reflect on the previous year; and it may not always hold nice stuff. The photos from these evenings are slices from your life, the perfect snapshot to sum it all up; every 31st of December, we do the same things: the menu is mostly the same, the purpose is always the same, but the people in the pictures change- and disappear, some, forever.  So be happy with what you have now, because you may not be able to find it in next year's photo of new year's eve.

Laws for War (?)

Apparently, you can't torture a prisoner of war. There's a law against it. But you can tear off people's legs, kill thousands of young boys who have yet to experience the things life has to offer, break up families, slaughter dreams, wipe out an entire nation and condemn the next generations to constant pain; and for what?

Just a few thousands of hectares of land. Because someone couldn't be satisfied with what they have. Because someone just couldn't help pulling the trigger.

War is brutal. It is the most horrific thing the human kind has invented and it is nothing but an eerie, twisted game soaked in blood.

But, there are the "War and international humanitarian laws" which regulate it, so it's actually all under control!

"Parties to a conflict and members of their armed forces do not have an unlimited choice of methods and means of warfare. It is prohibited to employ weapons or methods of warfare of a nature to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering." So you can slaughter the soldiers fighting for people who don't have blue eyes and fine hair, just not A LOT of them so that their deaths become "unnecessary".

 "Captured combatants are entitled to respect for their lives, dignity, personal rights and convictions." So you can't kill a "combatant" you take as a prisoner, but it's perfectly fine to kill thousands out on the field.

Of course, it is better to have some kind of regulation over an act of almost unlimited destruction than none. Still, even the act of forming "laws for war" confirms the need for wars and accepts that it is somewhat necessary. But wait! These laws also "prevent" civilians from dying and surrendered soldiers from being killed! So they're totally useful!

They would be, if everyone obeyed the laws. When people cannot even obey the simple command of halting at the sight of a red light, you cannot expect them to "follow the rules" when they are after the head of the king who "dominates the land of their ancestors". Sure, they impose some kind of power and create pressure on the people who violate them, but they don't make war a regulated act of  "quarrel". It just seems very ironic to establish laws about the most brutal act of humanity which violates uncountable moral laws. The laws are just like a fence the owner of an expensive house has installed around their property; the owners know it won't keep the burglars out, but it just makes them feel better about themselves when their houses get robbed- or when war brakes out and they retreat to their safe-houses on the skirts of the Alps with their copious amounts of cheese and pocketknives.

As you see, no matter how many frames  of "law" and "rights" and "rules" you fasten around war, it does not make it a painting of poppy fields and happy children running about. The frame just keeps the blood from soaking the gallery's floor where the people in power sit and watch other people fight  -and die- for them.

Lessons from Fiction

What do we do in our free time?

We watch TV shows.

We watch movies.

We listen to music.

We read books. 

 

But actually, when we listen to music, or watch a movie, we may just be feasting on one of the extensions of a work of literature, with out even knowing it. To all those people who regard studying literature as being useless: try living with out it and see how your life turns into a gray, disgusting bowl of mush.

Literature is everywhere, and what a man poured out onto ink and paper 300 years ago can always be studied and explored further, diving into the wells of the author's state of mind and emotions, newly discovering the lands the author has already conquered. There is always something to learn when you read someone else's writing, whether it's The Republic or a blog post.

Last week, the Turkish government issued a new law stating that the government now has the right to view any of our private chats and listen to our conversations over the phone. One of the newspapers which still, despite the horrendously oppressive government, can actually deliver true and "un-politicized" news, printed the heading "Big Brother Left Innocent". Whether it is the reference a minority newspaper in Turkey makes to a classic work of dystopic fiction to reflect what takes place in the real world, or that George Orwell, way back in 1948 predicted what would happen to the world and wrote a work of "fiction" on it which turns out to be eerily accurate, goes to show what fiction -and literature- are capable of.

Personally, I don't care much about a research being done on how reading literary fiction improves one's ability to detect the state of mind of a person from only their eyes. What I'm interested in is, how literary fiction, or any type of fiction, can help us get along in life and broaden our horizons. When we study these works, we get to know about the time period these books were written in, or about the years they take place in. We get to learn about different cultures and traditions, facts we would otherwise regard as unimportant and facts which we wouldn't search on Google about in our free time.

But these are just the tip of the iceberg.

The most important thing we gain by reading and studying works of fiction is getting to know people and how they react to certain events. We get to know different types of people, and by the end of the book, if the author was skillful enough, we get connected to the characters so tightly that we do not want to let go. We get to know what a grieving father thinks when he acts, we get to know what an assassin feels like when he completes his kill or gets his training, we  know what drives a man looking for vengeance, we know how a poet caught in the webs of a conspiracy against him and trapped inside the strict views and rules of a society feels like.

So reading and studying literary fiction-or any type of fiction, at that- is not a total waste of time as some people may assume it to be. Along with learning about the time periods and circumstances the novels were written/take place in, we also get to know people. And there's nothing wrong with getting to know more about the dominant -and supposedly the most intelligent- species on earth which we live among, compete with, and fall in love with.

Faith ...or Belief?

Location: Small town outside Lisbon, Portugal

Time: July 2013

"And there under the roof, was the place where "Our Lady of Fatima" appeared to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, the children of the house. Now if you will go there, pray, burn a candle, and have faith, Our Lady will listen to you. Don't forget, this place is very, very special," says the tour guide getting of the air conditioned bus with an "Our Lady of Fatima" super-souvenir-store ticket which offers a gift of a glowing little statue for every 15 euros you spend there in her hand, walking towards, along with many people, the grand church standing at the end and the highest point of a vast, concrete area.

[caption id="attachment_438" align="alignright" width="300"] "Sanctuary of our Lady of Fatima"-Where the first sighting took place. Millions of Christians flock here every year.[/caption]

This is Fatima, the "Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima", to be more precise, where, supposedly, Virgin Mary appeared to three little children for the first time in 1917 and first told the children to build a small chapel for her. Later came the "secrets", directed mainly at Lucia, the youngest of the three; "Our Lady of Fatima" told Lucia in one of her apparitions that World War I, which was going on at the time, would end in a year if Lucia, her brother and her cousin prayed to her. And, in fact, World War I ended in 1918, a year after these apparitions began.

Later in her life, after another "secret" from Our Lady of Fatima, stating that Lucia would be the only one to live through her teenage years, was "proven" to be true, Lucia had a dream. In this dream, a bishop dressed in white was tumbling across the market place, and seemed to be in distress; and when there was an assassination attempt at the Pope, also known as the Bishop of Rome, a few days later and he survived a  gun shot wound "which should have killed him", as his doctors put it, he stated that he "became a believer" - along with many, many other people.

Now what stands where Lucia supposedly saw Our Lady of Fatima for the first time, is a poly-carbon room, with a statue inside so deeply embedded behind the bullet-proof glass and the stone walls, risers, and all sorts of assortments, that it is barely visible. And also some three million people who migrate there every year who believe.

 

These people believe in the power of their prayers, and they do not only believe, but they have faith in it. They may believe the story of "Our Lady of Fatima", but they have faith in her when they buy candles in shapes of various body parts which they or someone close to them needs to survive, they have faith in her when they close their eyes tight with tears welling up around the corners and ask for forgiveness, they have faith in her when they travel thousands of miles and walk 100 meters on their knees to the church.

Faith is a subset of belief. Faith entitles power and hope. Belief entitles a set of mind.

Lucia had faith in "Our Lady of Fatima" when she sat on her knees in front of her bed before going to sleep and praying that the bombs and the crackling radio broadcasts her parents always listened to nowadays and the death all around and the men disappearing from around her to stop. But whether WWI ended because Lucia believed "Our Lady of Fatima", took her word for it, or because the nations were far past emaciated, is up for discussion.

And the main difference between belief and faith is that belief doesn't require the participation of the single most important bundle of muscle in our body pumping red hot liquid through our veins and into our souls; the heart.

Homeward Bound

"Home is where the heart is."

 

Have you ever been "homesick"?

It's not like any illness you've encountered and fought your way through until now.

Its symptoms are excessive longing for particular things, the blues syndrome, watering eyes, a sense of despair, among many others.

You know you've caught it when you wake up somewhere else in the morning and wish that you were home, wish so hard that you don't want to go to bed again that night without knowing that you will wake up at home.

You know you have it when you get up at night and can't find your way to the kitchen in the dark and something, something deep inside, feels seriously wrong.

You know you have it when you miss the view from your living room window, when you miss the smell of your house, when you miss everything and everyone inside it. And it hurts.

 

Homesickness is nothing pleasant, and its only cure is to GO HOME.

But going home...Ah, that feeling is one of the best ones in the world.

You unlock the door with out even looking at the lock, you swift open the door just enough so that it doesn't hit the shoe stand behind it, you step into your sanctuary, and that feeling of "being home" swoops over you and you're just feeling ecstatic.

Then the smell hits you. The smell you longed for while you were away but you didn't know so. You take off your coat, settle in your place on the couch with the optimal view of the TV yet also the perfect place to enjoy the sound system.

You finally know where everything is (at least most of the time), and you don't feel out of place. You're standing in a room which was formed and developed around you, by you, and for you.

 

Today is the last day of our vacation. Tomorrow, school -the seemingly-endless obstacle-race- begins. Today, lots of people return to their houses with the hope that this year will be better than the last one. Tonight, new year's resolutions will be made. Some will decide to study harder and some will decide to get on the lacrosse team. The familiar feeling of lying in your own bed returns; thinking about what classes you'll have tomorrow, checking if you've done all you've wanted to do that night, and slowly drifting into sleep and into the magical mystical world of dreams only to be awakened by the screaming alarm clock...That noise which snaps you back to reality and annoys you even if you hear it in another context.

Tomorrow morning, at least most of us, we go home. We go back to the building we spend most of our time in in a normal week-day, we go back to the people who we see more than our parents sometimes. We go back to our routine life styles and rituals, and that counts as going home as well.

And school may be opening and our days of freedom (although densely occupied with "summer homework") may be over and a marathon like no other, our senior year, may be beginning, but at least we get to spend it in our own place, with our people, at home.

Sometimes we get bored of the routines and the monotony and just to get away from all of it, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow,  we will always be "homeward bound".

 

 

The World in the Deep Blue

An endless void, a bottomless pit, a deep, dark cavity on the face of earth.

Not so appealing, right?

But when these are filled with the simple compound of hydrogen and oxygen, combined in eternal bond to provide us, humans, with the one thing we cannot do with out, water, they become indispensable.

Oceans, seas, lakes, or puddles on the sidewalk.

Just bodies of water; dents in the crust of earth into which water has rushed in, just naturally obeying the law of gravity, since before it was even established by our fellow apple-struck scientist.

But what makes these puddles so special? What makes one crave for a house on the hills of Hawaii, Miami, Bodrum, or Istanbul? What makes sitting on the balcony of your house overseeing the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea with a glass of aged wine and Stravinsky playing in the background so appealing?

I would place my bet on the fact that water, no matter what form it is in, calms you down. Let it be a tap left open, a rushing waterfall, a calm sea or the raging waves of the ocean, the sound or the sight of water is enough for one to relax and provide serenity.

And then there is actually being in the water rather than listening to it or looking at it.

Being on a boat in the middle of the sea, with no land visible on either side of you, with water and only water surrounding you, is an experience which somehow manages to provide you with a myriad of emotions; fear, loneliness, tranquility, happiness, reality. When you are standing on top of thousands of creatures you never could have imagined would exist, and a thousand other that you don't know about their existence, you snap back to reality. You let go of the magnanimity human kind carries around pridefully on their shoulders, and realize that then and there, you are alone, and you are just a form of life like the hundreds of jelly fish sucking on the body of your precious vessel.

When you actually go ahead and jump into the water from that boat, with the ice-cold water surrounding you in the blink of an eye, slowly cooling you down, stopping you from moving but at the same time urging you to do so, getting wet and cold on purpose never seems so charming, relaxing and plain beautiful to you. Or maybe it's just me.

Then you dive. You dive deep and you dive down, you hold your breath, water rushes into your ears, the only "sound" you hear is the gentle gushing of the water and maybe a distant "pat pat pat" of a small fishing boat. Other wise, you are engulfed in silence. Then, you enter a brave, new world which has nothing in common with the world you're used to living in. Creatures who, unlike you, don't feel the need to huff and puff to hold their breath under water, float beside you; looking for prey, looking for shelter, or just enjoying the water just like you. The rays of sunlight come streaking down and you can actually see the rays, slowly diffusing into the darkness of the depths; where sight ceases and life sprouts. Then you  remember that you are not one of the amazing creatures swimming around you with natural fins and snorkels and goggles. You feel like you should probably surface for air and when you turn around to look up, look at the surface of the water, seeming like a sheet of plastic film from down there, the sun, seeming blurry, and the water around you and the distance seem unreal. And the Sea decides it doesn't want you anymore and acts before you do, pushing you up where you belong.

So despite the grand structures we've built, the great technological advancements we've achieved and the enigmas of nature we've solved here on dry land, there is a whole other world waiting for us down there, out in the pool of salty water beyond us, covering up 3/4's of our "precious" planet, with structures and creatures like we've never seen before. There is a life out there that never ceases to amaze me. There, the "denizens of the deep", carry on their ordinary yet fascinating lives in a world we, the magnificent and intelligent humans, are not, probably one of the rare cases in history, involved in or a part of the plot. Except occasionally making guest appearances as the antagonists.

Little Kids with Giant Hopes

This week, the eleventh graders in our school went to a village school in one of the cities in Turkey. We had the opportunity to improve the conditions of their schools and at least scoop them out of their ordinary, boring lives if only just for two days and help them have the best time of their lives so far.

The experience cannot be shaped into mere words and sentences; it was too different and extraordinary to be reflected truly by letters put together in coherent structures. But I'll do my best.

I know that spending time with fifteen kids and having them do artwork or painting their school or setting up a library in just one elementary school in one village in one city in Turkey in the whole world may not seem as much. It seems that there is much, much more we can do, and that is true. When I reflect back to the time of the day we saw the kids run off to their houses at the end of our last day there, carrying their brilliant pieces of art in their hands and decorated by the jewelry they made for themselves, to return back to what they used to do the very next day, some next to his/her parents to work in the farm, some at home to do the work, and some, actually a minority, coming to a school seeming so empty without us there again the next day; there was so much more that we could do. I thought that this was not enough.

Right then, a little girl who I spent a long time with during the activities came up to me and hugged me, with her incredibly beautiful masterpieces of art hanging around her neck, glimmering in the sunlight.

I remembered how every one of them listened intently when we were describing the new activity.

I remembered the boy in the front row getting the hang of the activity we were doing before we could, and enjoying himself so much that his joy was apparent from his deep, dark, shining eyes.

I remembered how they looked up and thanked me every time I helped them with something.

Then, it seemed like we had done everything we could have. I felt satisfied with the work that we did, because we made children happy. Yes, they may have to work in the fields the next day and those hands which so delicately beaded, drew and cut, may be used to tie knots or weed the garden, and get bruised, cut, and harmed. Yes, the girl who wants to be a doctor when she grows up may be forced to marry a much older guy in the next 10 years and look after kids. But that fire of hope we saw in their eyes, that passion to learn and the happiness they had when they were showered with affection and attention, will never go out. The hands of the incredibly talented boy may  be bruised and his fingers may be damaged, the girl who wanted to become a singer may lose her voice from yelling at the sheep to keep them together, but their will to learn can never be broken. And seeing this and at least having a part in shaping their lives and strengthening their wills, showing them what they could do, what lies beyond the valley in which their own little village was settled in, was more than enough to be satisfied with what we had done.  They are the little, lost kids of our country with giant hopes and even bigger hearts, who are waiting to be found by people like us.

The Secret Superheroes

As we entered Kuğulu Park, one of Ankara's oldest parks and the place where all our generation spent their weekend as small, reckless children throwing food at the beautiful swans from our illustrated fairy tale books and the pigeons, which we had mixed feelings about, the clouds gathered up, up, in the sky, and the first drops of rain began to fall onto the cheerful "protesters".

On the eighth day of the protests, the people were happy as they could ever be, the students singing songs, holding up signs. Not a patch of green was visible on the slopes of Kuğulu Park.

My sanctuary as a child was now the home of many sharing the same ideals and same thoughts, although they were all drastically different.

Some wore their teams' colors.

Some carried slogans stating that people of their religion were standing with everyone else, then, and there.

And some just sat there, with V for Vendetta masks hung around their necks, beer in their hands, holding slogans painted onto paper that I could never have thought of, chatting, waiting. The secret superheroes of this whole resistance; every one of them being Clark Kent's in the day time, taking their exams, going to seminars, attending their lectures, but transforming into superheroes that Turkey needed in the night, with their nerves and stubbornness of steel. They were waiting for it all to begin.

Waiting.

We pushed through the crowd which was now looking for an indoor place because of the rain which decided to come down a little harder. As we walked down Tunalı, the street which Kuğulu Park is located at the end of, we saw them.

They were walking up, towards Kuğulu Park, with their flags, their horns, their whistles, their black and white shirts, their unity, their youth, their passion.

The fan club of one of the major teams in Turkey, Beşiktaş, had come over from Istanbul, hearing of the increasing use of excessive force against the protesters and of the growing protests, to support us. A crowd of nearly 3000 people was walking up to Kuğulu Park. And they were very much welcomed.

[caption id="attachment_426" align="alignright" width="187"] Yes, those are people on the slope there.[/caption]

We went into a restaurant to dry off and eat something for the next thirty minutes. When we got out, all of the people who had gathered in Kuğulu Park had started walking down Tunalı. Destination: Kızılay, the very heart of all protests. We joined them, and walked with them. If under any other circumstance one needed 10000 people to yell out something in unison, or do something together, it couldn't have been done. But last night, everyone acted as if they were one. One for all, all for one was the idea hanging upon Tunali as the crowd marched forward.

Remember the people who were waiting in Kuğulu Park with their beers? They were walking at the front, leading the group, happy to finally belong somewhere.

And the people who were fine with coming out to their balconies and banging pots from there for the past few evenings were on the street too.

The secret superheroes had ripped open their clean dress shirts, and they were coming to the rescue.

Of course, when this enormous group reached Kızılay, the police stood waiting, and dispersed the group using tear gas and pressurized water. The group was physically dispersed, but every one was still together; one heart, one idea.

But that's not important. The groups being dispersed by the outraged police with anger management issues is kind of a given now. The important thing is to see that 10000 people walked to Kızılay with no prior organization, no leader, no commands given. Everyone was there because they wanted to, not because they followed the heads of the bodies of thought that they believed in, not because they were forced to be there by someone else, or something else.

They were there because they wanted to fight.

They were there because they simply could not resist sitting at home while the country was just waking up.

They were there because they wanted to and because they believed in their cause, every one for separate reasons. And when that is the case, everything else ceases to matter.

The Left Hand

In one of his poems, the Turkish poet Orhan Veli said:

"I got drunk,

And I remembered you again;

My left hand,

My unpracticed hand,

My poor hand!"

Although this poem may seem to be written on a whim and not tell of much, it tells the truth.

Today, I tried playing the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. Towards the middle of this movement, the right and left hands change place; so instead of the usual left hand accompaniment and the right hand singing the melody, now the right hand  sets off with the sixteenth alberti bass accompaniment, and the left hand takes the lead!

Only, it wasn't that easy.

It is expected that people who play the piano and are right-handed to somehow have better use of their left hands compared to other people. Well, that is not entirely true. The piano is actually set for the weakness of the left hand and the strength of the other one (well, except some of Chopin's pieces, maybe). So the pianists actually need to put their left hand in the background, and whether that requires more muscle control or less, is up for discussion.

So we boast about being the "superior species", but we can't even use one of our hands when a cheetah has no preference over whether it should kill with its left or right claw.

I think the reason why Beethoven and Chopin have included the left hand dominantly in their pieces is, first of all, they are composers from the romantic era, so they could do almost anything and get away with it (I mean, the man put a choir into a symphony!), but most importantly, that they wanted to do something different. When you want to play a Chopin piece, a waltz, a mazurka, or a nocturne, you need to practice the left hand separately, get it set, and then add the beautiful right hand melody and embellishments.

Our left hand seems useless sometimes. We may regard it as a vulnerability against other animals or creatures, or we may simply see it as a weak limb, liability. However, when it comes to real life, we definitely  need it and we actually use it more than we think. If we took out the left hand from any piano piece, the melody and the chords would still be there, yes, but it just would not sound right. Our left hand is like the double bass in an orchestra or a bass guitar in a band; you don't notice it when it is there, but when it is gone, you miss it and the music feels empty.

That is, if you are right-handed. If you are a leftie, well, that's a whole other story.

Knock Knock

Avoid the black cat!

Salt over the left shoulder.

Knock on wood.

Rabbit's foot.

Wear the evil eye.

There, all set to go!

All of these actions are things we do every day in order to set our lives on track. When we see a black cat, we expect our day to go terribly wrong. When we pass under a ladder, we live through the day frightened of what may happen.

These superstitions are nothing more than stupid beliefs we cling on to in order to have an "external force" act on our lives, change its current projectile and destination. We think that wearing an evil eye will protect us from a car crash, so we drive more recklessly. And when we don't actually crash into the back of a truck, we think it is because of the "eye".

When we see an owl on the sedge of our balcony, we expect someone to die in the following 24 hours. At least that's the way things work in Turkey.

If we have a rabbit's foot around our necks, well, then, we will ace the physics test!

But actually all of this is caused by logical fallacies. We only notice that there was an owl on our balcony if someone dies that day and we assume a causality. We can always perform poorly at an exam, but that one single time you may not be wearing your evil eye, and, again, we do the best thing humans do, the thing we are all professionals at; we assume. So these traditions are born by your very own mind tricking you. Like every false, hollow, seemingly-useful-but-really-not-worth-a-dime thing on our planet today,superstitions, too, are created only by humans.  They are all things humanity sticks onto to be able to blame something else for what happens to them. Superstitions exist for the same reasons that religion exists for. All these false beliefs are built on the same, selfish, arrogant idea: something went wrong? blame it on someone else.

So, we do knock on wood when we see a very pretty baby, or when someone mentions something horrible happening to another person. I personally do not believe that me knocking on the aged furniture at our house, not even real wood, probably, would delay the Reaper and turn him the wrong way at the intersection just down the road from our home, but my grandma does, and she tells me to do so, insistingly.

Even the most skeptical person on the face of earth, the scientists at CERN or the astronauts in the space shuttle looking down on our blue marble, has an instance of doubt when a black cat walks across the road right in front of them, or when a mirror shatters into a thousand pieces in their apartments.

So when I take the IB exams next year, I won't depend on an evil eye to protect me or a knock on the table to get me a 7. But, just to be safe, I still will wear my blue necklace, be careful around mirrors for the couple of weeks before the exams, pull my hair if I see a black cat on the street while waiting for the bus, and knock on the wood if anyone mentions failing the test or getting a bad grade, because you never know. Someday, those guys at CERN or USC Research Team may just announce that knocking on wood increases your intelligence and awareness.

 

N/A

On the day of mothers last week, a day mothers all around the world are supposed to be showered with love and affection and kindness, two trucks loaded with explosives exploded in Reyhanlı, a province in Hatay, one of the 81 cities in Turkey.

It was initially announced that 45 people passed away.

Then the numbers started increasing, the day on our calenders was painted blood red; but also deep, dark black.

And then, the press was banned from reporting anything that happened or is happening in Reyhanlı. Censorship reared its ugly head.

While the whole country was waiting for the announcement of a national mourning, that very night, two of the countries best and most popular -and also arch rival- teams played a soccer game. And the game wasn't even that important because one of the teams had already declared their championship. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr were all engulfed by status updates supporting their teams. Only a couple cared about the increasing body count in Reyhanlı.

Three days later, university students protested what happened in Reyhanlı and the government's lack of interest in it. They were doused with tear gas, beaten by the police. They sat on the highway connecting two major parts of Ankara. They were wounded, first by the incidence, then by the ignorant and brutal cops. They were armed only by their hate towards terrorism and their love for their country. Nothing else. Yet they were attacked like they were the ones who killed those now-100 people in Reyhanlı; and the irony is that, the people really responsible for that were not being tried to be discovered, apparently, they weren't as dangerous as these university students.

And now, Turkey has forgotten. Like every event which happens, let it be something good or something bad, it is discussed in news programs, barber shops, market registers and streets one day, and in the next, it is forgotten. The government is desperately trying to change the agenda by trying to pass a law regarding the consumption of alcohol in restaurants in Turkey, and the media gladly took the bait.

But this time around, this procedure was catalyzed. We were forced to forget, or rather, we were not reminded. The newspapers, the evening, morning news broadcasts could not mention anything about this event. I don't think they would want to, anyway. Forgive and forget, right?

Tomorrow is the 19th of May which is the National Youth and Sports Day in Turkey. That day in 1919, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk set foot on land in the heart of Anatolia, and began the war for national independence, the resistance was afoot. Later, in 1938, Atatürk rewarded this special day to the youth of Turkey to whom he tied all of his hopes to. And suddenly, the government which did not bother to declare national mourning on the day of the event and sent its president to the USA to discuss some "critical" matters with Barack Obama while the president's country was soaked with the blood of innocent people, terror and fright, decided to cancel the celebrations of Youth and Sports Day because of the incidence in Reyhanlı. In the time we need to get together as a country and celebrate, unite, stand behind our country and democracy and everything that Atatürk trusted us, the youth of Turkey, with, we cannot. We are not allowed to.

I've blamed everything on the government of Turkey in my post here, but do not be mistaken, the people under the goverment, us, need to get half the blame. The day of the Boston bombings, most of my friends wrote condolence messages, RIP's on their precious Facebook Timelines, for three dead and 246 injured halfway across the world, but when that bloody Sunday rushed in, I saw nothing; nothing on my news feed, it wasn't talked about in Twitter, the same friends who "wished patience" to the injured ones in Boston posted "congratz" messages for their team for the soccer game that night. Of course what happened in Boston was horrible and it should not happen ever again and we are all sorry about it, but when an event of similar sort happens in your country with two hundred times the death toll, you should be able to be sorry about it as well, if not more. You should care about the dead people and the orphan children in Turkey as much as you did about the people in the US, if not more. You should, we should, because it is our country, our people.

Ignorance is being forced into our brains right now, and even though some people, like those university students or the people who organized this protest walk to the parliament building which will take place tomorrow are resisting against it, the media, the important people of the country, its celebrities, its athletes, are not. In fact, most people are not. And now, a week has passed, and still there are bodies being taken out from under the wreckage, the debris, at first by the people themselves because the government did not send any help, and everyone has already forgotten. Maybe not totally erased from their brains, maybe there is still a crumb of care and sorrow somewhere in their hearts when they are at their brunch on the side of the Bosporus with their friends and family.

All I can say is that, they cannot make everyone forget about it, about their mistakes, about their ignorance. Even if they ban the media and not allow congressman into the province, some of us will simply not forget. At least, we will try not to, and stay true to our nation and our values we fought so hard for only a hundred years ago. To every children who has lost their parents on that Sunday, to every mother who has lost her son, to every bride who lost her groom, to every sister who has lost her brother, I present my deepest condolences.

;

Names to Fit

On Friday, I did not wake up at 6:30 in the morning to get dressed up and go to school to "learn" and "have fun", really to be tested all the time. Instead, I woke up at 7:40, with butterflies fluttering in my stomach, my fingers waiting anxiously to embrace my piano for the final time before we got in a cab in the rainy, humid morning to take place in a piano contest.

Each grade was assigned a specific piece before hand, ours was a Kuhlau Sonata, and we got to pick another piece, which could be anything at all... as long as it did not exceed three minutes.

We got there a little early, and sat in the cafeteria of the relatively small school. While my mom and I were waiting for my name to be called, students would come and go, some there for the very same competition, with their sheet music in their hands, some with their fathers making them follow him around, some in haste, trying to get copies of the criteria before he/she got called in. And there were some who came with their teachers. This was the last day of the competition, so it was grades 10, 11 and 12 for piano and guitar, and most of these competitors had their valued tutors and "supporting" parents with them. Their tutors were giving them advice, speaking to them with such hurtful ambition and speed, speaking the way a boxing coach speaks to his athlete, telling him how to beat up his opponent so badly that he faints, just before the bell authorizing violence chimes among the halls of gambling, ambition, and money. The parents on the other hand, were a whole new kind. Some sat by, chatting with their children, as my own mother did, actually, she played a game on the iPad while I studied for my French test,  while some were worse than the tutors; parents instructing their children, and their children frantically practicing the hard passages of their pieces on the plastic coffee table they sat in.  One father was dressed up in a suit, his son also dressed up in a black shirt with black suit pants and black, shiny shoes, lead his son around the cafeteria. The boy didn't look up.

Finally, I was called up, along with fifteen other students, and they took us up a floor, where we continued to wait.

When I had four or five people remaining to go before me, we started talking to each other. I sat next to two very, very different people.

One of them could not afford to but a piano, so she had a keyboard at home on which she would practice the passages and parts of pieces, and then she would play her pieces on the piano at her school every day.

The other one's name was Idil, named after the famous Turkish pianist Idil Biret. Her parents bought her a piano when she was born. She played the piano since she was 4-5 years old; but she hated it. She told us that she did not enjoy it at all and that "she did not have anything to do with it." I had the opportunity to listen to both of my new friends. The first girl played quite well, but you could tell she could use a little bit more practice. The second one, Idil, could not play very well, it was as if she was sight reading the pre-determined repertoire right there, and, it was not that hard to sight read. The jury stopped her at the middle of her first piece, asking her to commence with her second piece which she chose. She came out of the room, happy that it was over, while I went in the room, excited to see the piano, the people, and to cross something off my bucket-list.

And today is mother's day. A day only for the most patient -well, most of the time- , most loving, most encouraging creatures on the face of earth. They are indeed special, all parents are, but when they try to change the course of their children's lives, when they try to make their lives into the life they've always wanted to have but couldn't, they become more ambitious, almost to a degree which could hurt their children... But sometimes, they do help them, some become great pianists, great doctors because of their parents' push, but some always look up to their parents, not in the good way, and to everyone around them, walk with their heads down, always trying to live up to their name, while they fail to realize for their whole lives that it is their names who should fit them, not the other way around.

Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Yesterday, I performed at a concert. And until the moment I got up on the stage (I was the last to go, by the way), I practically lived the statement "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".

The concert was organized by my piano teacher and she wanted her students to give a concert. She asked me if I would play in it. I said, "Gladly!". She asked me if I had anything to do that Tuesday night, May 7th. I thought about it for a while, and the date rang the bell: math exam, Ding! Luckily, the test was on Tuesday, so I didn't have any studying to do that night. Anyway. She told me that the rehearsal would be at 18:00. I told her that I come from school around 17:00 and I could easily make it... Haha.

So Tuesday came rolling, I took the painfully hard calculus exam, and was excited the whole day for the concert that night. I got on the bus, and because of the people who took the bus that day, I  realized that I would be dropped off 3rd from the last.

But that was just the beginning.

The road we normally take was unusually and incredibly crowded and a jogging turtle could have passed us for a while there.

When it was finally my turn to get dropped off, the bus driver "forgot" I was in the bus and missed the turn which lead to my street. I had to ride along in the bus until he dropped off the remaining three people.

I finally got home, ate some stuff so fast I couldn't taste it, fixed myself an outfit, splashed on some makeup, and we were getting in a cab at 18:10.

Oh, what's that?

Some people tried to take charge and are running around yelling shallow slogans with banners in their hands, so the police closed off a street.

Some genius city planner decided to work on the asphalt in one of the main arteries at the place I was going to, so bye-bye free flowing traffic!

It took us 30 minutes to go somewhere we would've gone in 10 minutes any other day.

Now, I don't want to commit any logical fallacies or anything, but, if all of these weren't Murphy's Laws alive in flesh and blood, what were they?

Of course, I would not notice the jammed traffic every other day when I did not have a concert to get to.

I would not care so much if the bus driver had forgotten to drop me off any other day. So maybe, just because today I had somewhere and some event I had to get to, because I searched for misfortunes all along the way, I noticed these stuff.

Nonetheless, something, maybe a decision I made or maybe the fluttering of a butterfly's wings on the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai caused me to be late to that concert. I don't know what was at work that day, but that chaotic afternoon was far from normal... Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Drunk From the Wine of Power

When we say kings, queens and monarchy, we immediately think of sword fights, public executions, men in tights with music playing in the background with parallel fifths and fourths, a fat, arrogant man sitting on a throne surrounded by gold looted from conquered cities. We think that those days of kings and queens are in the past.

However, they have never been so close to us.

Once one of the most powerful nations now drowning in its own economic slump powered by unnecessary inflation, the U.K., in fact, has a queen as their leader.

Today was Queen's Day (actually to be King's Day from now on because the current queen has left the throne for his son), a special day in the Netherlands to celebrate the birthday of their queen and the previous queens.

So, opposing contrary belief and our conditioning, kings and queens do play an important role in our society.

And you could argue about what's wrong with that. The glitch in this system is that nobody wants to give up their supreme and unquestioned power; moreover, everyone wants to obtain that power. Because when you're the king or the queen of a nation, you are at the top, you don't take orders from anyone; only mere suggestions posed at "your grace", and, well, if you don't like their suggestions, Off with their heads! OK, maybe not necessarily decapitation in 2013, but you get the gist.

The honorable and right thing to do is to give up the throne when you've had enough time under the limelight and enough glory to carry on with you, to pass on the throne to your descendants to let them rule the country for a while, not to cling on to it until you can barely walk and until your son gets to the age you should have left the throne at.

But again, being drunk from the wine of power is irresistible, and the wine is just too, too sweet to give up.

Survivor

The thing I do most Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights is to watch the TV show Survivor. What the basically is that they drop 20 volunteers on an island and let them starve, while they dangle food in front of them to motivate them to play several games requiring condition, concentration and coordination.

Although the morals of this competition is questionable, it is surely fun to watch and is very exciting.

The goal in this competition is pretty clear; survival. Although they start out as teams, it all comes down to individuals and who appeals to the public the most, because, I don't know about the other formats of the competition, but in Turkey, who goes and who stays is determined by the votes of the audience.

This competition seems fit for the Turkish audience, thanks to all the drama and the sadness, but I guess there is always an audience ready for emotional exploitation in every nation.

In the end, it entertains the common audience (one of them being myself), but I'm watching the show of survival, limited food, almost no shelter and loneliness with a bowl of strawberries in front of me and my iPad and family next to me. It may not be so "entertaining" to someone who has bought the TV they're watching the show in by giving up eating red meat for three months. Just saying.

Books

The doors swung open, creaking creepily, and there I was. The smell was overwhelming; an incredible medley of the smell of paper, dust and ink. Rows, shelves, spread all over the place, as far as you could see. Signs indicating where specific genres are placed, and that feeling, that feeling you get when you see the sign you're looking for, the genre you read all the time and start walking towards it, is nonexchangeable. Then you come across the shelves and shelves of the thing you're looking for, so many of them that you don't know where to begin. You feel happy and excited to go through all of them. You pick one that catches your eye, flip to the back, glance, then flutter the pages, and the smell hits you again, and you know you have to buy that. You are anxious to get home and start it, bend the cover neatly for the first time, crease the spine, "en premier", read the opening paragraph and get introduced to the world that lies beyond the neatly designed cover. And the moment you open the cover, pass through the copyrights, the short intro by the editor, sometimes, the table of contents, and reach the first line, read it, and comprehend it, you have been introduced into a whole, new world. A make-believe one, maybe, but just as real as the life you're living when you drop down the book.

The actions, feelings and senses I described above can be related to one, single object: books.

Books can never be replaced, not by "e-books", not by Kindles, not by PDF's, now by "audio books". They have their own special place in our hearts, well, at least in mine, and are probably one of the greatest inventions of man kind.

It was a big mistake of mine to download Stephen King's novel, It, which is nearly 10 cm thick in paperback, to read it on the Kindle. Sure, you can easily find the definition of a word, don't need to keep a bookmark, and don't need to haul the brick-like book around with you, but these advantages of the Kindle do not make up for the real-deal; paperback books.

Seeing the percentage you've read at the bottom of the screen of the Kindle is not the same as turning the book sideways and flipping the pages to see how long you've got to go.

Just shutting down the Kindle without marking your place is not the same as putting your "bookmark"- very seldom a real bookmark though, most commonly a receipt from a store, a note paper with numbers scribbled onto it, numbers which have now lost their meaning to you, maybe, if you come across one, a Post-It note, or just the ripped corner of a piece of paper-and skimming through the next couple of pages to see where the chapter ends.

Most importantly, holding the Kindle in your hand, so light and thin, is not the same as holding a paperback book, with the shadows of the pages on the left cast upon the pages on the right.

Electronic devices have replaced many everyday objects in our lives today, from scales to stock markets, but there is one thing they will never be able to replace: real, paperback or hardcover books which you can flip through the pages, actually turn the pages, feel them, and be caressed by the soft wind they generate and be mesmerized by their smell which takes you back down "memory-lane".

 

Walking Down the Hallway

Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day.

So, we went around reading poems to random people in our school, you know, just to make their day a little different than the previous one or the next one.

Here are the responses I got after I read my poem to different people:

"Wow!"

"Very deep, very meaningful."

"Good."

"OK..?"

My poem was Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveler from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yes, I read this beautiful poem and the answer I got was "OK..?". I guess people didn't really understand it because they could not read it over and over again, underline the rhyme scheme, dig out the connotations of the words, identifying literary tools, alliterations, symbols, like we usually do when we have a poem at hand. We plunge so deep into the stanzas, deep into the lines, deep into the words and deep into the letters, that we forget what the poet and the poem is really trying to say. We say that the capital M in the word "ye Mighty" reflects the poet's beliefs and puts an emphasis on the word, while, simply, it shows how the great Egyptian king, Ozymandias, lived his life trying to compete with a so-called divine being. It shows how desperate he is for power, it shows his ambitions - and how now "nothing beside remains"...

But that's what happens in real life. Unless we have a task we have accomplish using the piece of art, we simply glance at it, pass our eyes over it, hear it for a few seconds and return to our business. When I play the piano at my house, my family usually listens to me and compliments or criticizes my playing, but yesterday, I probably played a Chopin Nocturne the best I've ever had for the past 4 years I've been playing it, but when I finished the piece, with the two C-Sharps, 5 octaves apart, softly humming and slowly disappearing into the silence, no one said anything. They were busy playing games on their computers or cleaning up the kitchen.

We usually don't have to analyze a piece of music we hear in everyday life and determine its musical, structural and contextual features.

We usually don't need to write an essay on "how the poet conveys his thoughts and feelings..." when we come across a piece of literature; a sonnet, a Haiku, a slice of prose...

We usually don't need to publish a two-page review on an artwork we pass by when we walk around the hallways of our school.

So, we don't care about them.

But we should.

We should listen to that piece of music like it is the last thing we are going to hear, we should read that piece of literature like it is the first thing we ever read, we should "see" that paintings, not just look, but actually "see", like that is the last thing we will ever see. We should appreciate life's beauties, one of which is called art, at whenever possible, not when it is Poem in Your Pocket Day, not when you have to write a 350 word essay, not when you have to post a blog post by Friday night about it, not matter what. Because, life is walking down a hallway with paintings on the walls, music playing in the background and people talking to you, and if you don't stop and "hear", don't listen, and "look", don't see, you might as well be walking in a desert, with no food or water.

 

Imagining Some Fear

"...Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other. Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's  rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It. 'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!"

This exquisite passage you just read is by Stephen King, the great author of horror novels, and is from his fiction work, It.

As I read this passage for the first time, in bed, with the lights turned low at late in the night, with the house creepily living on around me with no intention of falling asleep, I felt the same as Ben Hanscom. The sweat, the fear, the anxiety, the horror; and this was all thanks to the incredibly vivid descriptions by Stephen King, fruits of his teeming imagination.

Without King's imagination, there would be no horror in that passage. I would not start to look at clowns as I've never done before. I wouldn't close my eyes and see Pennywise the Clown, probably completely different from what King had in mind when he wrote that passage. Because as I read the passage, I blend that description with my own imagination, and create something totally different. Still horrifying, but in another way; horrifying for me.

This is why I believe it is safe to agree with the greatest mystery writer of all time, the inventor of the logical, arrogant, neat, socially-awkward "consultant" Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on his saying,"when there is no imagination, there is no horror."

We cannot be afraid of something that does not exist in our minds.

Can a 3-year-old be afraid of a nuclear war starting, or an earthquake?

They are more likely to be horrified by the idea of slimy, forever-famished, hideous creatures, "monsters", I believe that's what they call them, hiding under their beds, sneakily waiting until they fall asleep, into the deep and wondrous world of dreams, and just linger their arms over the edge...

The moment we think of something, it spurs into life, instantaneously, and, unfortunately, you cannot hit "delete".

What the monster in It does is that it reads the minds of the children and takes the form of the thing they're most afraid of. The thing they imagined would harm them. The thing they think is hiding in their closet. For Ben, it was a mummy. For Eddie Kaspbarak, it was a werewolf.

Shakespeare wrote, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, that a lunatic, a lover and a poet all have different imaginations and comprehend the world differently; while the lover sees "a gypsy as the world's most beautiful woman", the madmen sees "hell" and "devils", all the while the poet "shapes" what he sees into immortal words, seeing something to write about in "airy nothing". And all of these people, with their crazy imaginations colossally different from each other, can easily perceive a "bush" as "a bear" in the night, by "imagining some fear".

Without our imaginations, we wouldn't have anything to be afraid of; we would not have a great machine behind our wondering eyes, restlessly imagining and recording things; spawning horrible thoughts, scary animals, worst-case-scenarios. King "imagines some fear" of his own, and puts them on paper masterfully, allowing us to "imagine" some horror for ourselves; people who read the passage in the beginning of this blog post fear completely different things. Now that you've read the passage, and imagined your own fear,  it's up to you to decide whether you are the lunatic, the lover, or the poet.

Scales & Sonatas

"Hello, what part of the test would you like to take first?"

"The scales and arpeggios, please"

"Very well then, would you play an E Major scale, contrary motion, 4 octaves, followed by an F # Major scale, hands a third apart, four octaves."

The British examiner sat in a wooden, antique desk at the corner of the room, with sheets of paper in front of him; blank forms waiting to be filled up either with positive remarks of "good musicianship" or remarks of "failure". The pointy insulation material which covered the room's walls made the not-so-small exam room look like a dungeon. The piano was clearly new, the keys had a peculiar touch to them: they have not yet faced great pianists, intent accompanists, challenging, finger-blurring Liszt pieces, touchy Chopin pieces in which they were touched with delicacy as much as emotion... A hard, fresh piano; the hardest to play on. 

On Tuesday, I took the ABRSM piano exam for the first time. I had prepared my pieces as well as I could have with all the time I had left after the excessive time that IB requires was spent of lab reports and studying. The aural test was a "no worry" one, I was pretty confident in my ear for music, that probably comes with playing the piano for 13 years. The part which worried me the most was the "Scales and Arpeggios" part. Every applicant who wants to take the Grade 7 piano test had to memorize 60-something scales and arpeggios, from a scale in F# Major, which has 6 sharps, and the most number of sharps one can have is seven, to diminished sevenths starting from A, both hands, four octaves.

Somehow, this test managed to make me have to play the piano and do it without enjoying it. I used to practice the piano because I had fun doing it, but when preparing for this test, I dreaded each minute of practice. Yes, playing scales improves a pianist's skills a lot, but when you're not doing something because you enjoy it, I don't think there is any point in doing it. I think that playing 40 scales from memory, allegro, with both hands or separately, is just a way of fitting art into forms, molding music to a shape in which it can be criticized...by numbers.

I played a Gershwin piece, one of Tchaikovsky's Months, and one Beethoven Sonata.

I am also preparing for a piano competition, and I need to learn a Kuhlau Sonata.

Hey!

Sonatas!

The most boring forms of music for the piano, at least for me. Pearls of the classical era. Twists, trills, clean, expected, totally predictable chord progressions, clear dynamic markings, and the left hand working like a machine. Every kind of test for the piano involves a sonata, because the sonata itself is "grade-able". There is not a way for you to show yourself through it, no emotions, no room for interpretation, every one plays the sonata exactly the same way. This way, it is easier for the examiners to give grades to the pianist, based solely upon how you play the stuff that is written in front of you on the piano, exactly like it is written. They judge you on similarity, not individuality.

These kinds of exams and strict, demanding teachers and parents make the little pianists believe that the only thing to play on the piano are boring, mechanical pieces.

They make them believe that they have to play exactly what is written in front of them.

They make them believe that you cannot enjoy playing classical music.

They don't tell them that you can play the rock songs you listen to everyday on the piano, or that you can change the pieces you play, interpret them yourself, even if it is a sonata or a nocturne.

They don't tell them you can actually enjoy classical music, both listening to it, and playing it on the piano.

Fitting music into standards and rubrics and forms is the worst way to decide how good a person is in playing that instrument. Because of this insane compulsion of humans to measure everything and prove they're the best in that subject, they are killing the joy of playing classical music, by reducing the colorful, wondrous, melodic, beautiful and incredibly varied world of classical music which could be played on the piano, into simple, arid scales & sonatas.

 

 

iPhones and Replicants

Last weekend, we needed to get our TV fixed, so we called the LG customer service in Turkey. A mechanical voice answered the phone, telling us to press numbers according to why we were calling, and then to "state our problem in a few words" to leave a message. We didn't even get to talk to a real person.

When we say "machines", people think of factories; pistons pumpin' and engines runnin'.

Your iPhone is a machine. The computer I'm writing this blog post on is a machine. My piano's a machine.

Yes, machines are all we need to make our lives more efficient, produce or consume more in less time, with less opportunity costs. They are the pearls of our world today, the very reason why innovation is so important...?

The x-ray is a machine. Guns are machines.

I am not in the group of people who worship The Machines and adore them. I think that we are way, way too involved with them and there is no way this can result in anything good.

Yesterday, I watched a TV show in which the cops went to a gun store to get information on a customer,  a suspect in a murder investigation. The gun shop owner kept saying the famous phrase "Guns don't kill". Finally, one of the cops said, "Stupid people with guns kill".

I cannot emphasize how true this statement by the cop is. Yes, guns sitting on the counter may not spontaneously go off and kill someone who double-crossed it, maybe forgot to grease it in the morning, but people, particularly stupid people with guns, do kill. The gun is the most horrible machine to have ever been invented and to have gotten into the hands of humans. Maybe it is useful in the military business, but now nearly 40 % of America has a gun stored under their pillow.

Apart from guns, which were designed to hurt and kill, there are machines which are really, really creepy.  The LG Customer Service talking-lady was certainly creepy; machines replacing humans. My iPhone recognizes what I say, converts it into text, understands it, and answers me. What is not creepy about that?

The movies Blade Runner and The Matrix are classified as science fiction. In both, machines rise against humans and they overpower them, gaining control over the world. It may sound a little paranoid, but with what we have right now; 3D without glasses, phones who talk to you, robots who serve you, those days of Replicants doesn't seem to be far away - that is, assuming that we all don't kill each other with those guns before that.