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.

What Went Wrong?

Only a couple thousand years ago, the Arab world was populated with alchemists, mathematicians, and philosophers who have had huge contributions to our current bank of knowledge in science, math or philosophy. Al-Farabi was recognized as The Second Teacher, Aristotle being The First Teacher. Al-Khwarizmi created and started using the "zero" for the first time. Jabir Ibn-Hayyan discovered the hydrochloric acid. Ibn-Sina identified the nerve cells and what they do to transmit pain, among many other discoveries. All of these important men lived in the same era; approximately around the years 800-1200. So, what went wrong? What turned the Arab world into being recognized as " a very rich public with lots of oil"? The answer to these questions is the same for every question which seeks the reason behind a stop in development, a misunderstanding, or any war; it is religion.

But blaming it strictly on religion isn't fair. Religion, if used in certain ways, could unite people instead of pitting them against each other. Dogmatism and strict religion was what caused these advancements by the Arabic scientists to stop, because Islam was already there when these discoveries took place; what wasn't there was dogmatism.

And we shouldn't be putting the whole load on Islam. Unfortunately, Islam is recognized as a very strict religion with no means or what-so-ever with science and logical thinking, and is related with violence. If you were to take an objective stance in the case, however, you would see that all religions can be bent, stretched, understood or portrayed differently, and it is very easy to manipulate people using religion.

So, I guess it is safe to say that what caused the "knowledge spring" of the Arab world to stop one thousand years ago, was not specifically Islam or religion, but that it was dogmatism and inside-the-box thinking or not thinking at all, which has, and will continue to, ruin and stop many nations and civilizations from reaching freedom or enlightenment.

The Intelligent Animal

HUMAN

Dictionary Definition: A human being, esp. a person as distinguished from an animal or (in science fiction) an alien.

Religious Definition: God's most elaborate creation.

Matrix Definition: A virus.

So, what are we? Are we animals? Are we the most superior species? I believe that only one of the previous definitions are correct. Humans, are indeed very much like viruses, as it was stated in the movie The Matrix, by an Agent. He said, "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus." Humans, arrogant little beings which dominate the world and effectively destroy it, is what we are.

What differentiates us from animals is our arrogance and our vulnerability. We don't have tails to restore our balance, we can't run as fast as a cheetah, we don't have sharp claws like a lion to protect ourselves. Without our technological widgets -and by technological widgets I don't only mean things which run on electricity, but any of our inventions from the wheel to the F16 planes- we would be completely vulnerable. Our only tool is our brains and that is what we use in order to survive. We build houses, barracks, tanks, guns, nuclear power stations, spaceships, all with one single and main resource: our brain, therefore our intelligence.

Humans, who have made it a habit to compete in everything, have found a way to measure who is smart and who is not; by an I.Q. test. But what can be said about the reliability of these I.Q. tests? Is intelligence made up of only solving math problems and completing patterns and finding the missing piece? I don't think so. As far as I'm concerned, people may be "intelligent" in different areas; some may be intelligent in music, like Bach, some may be intelligent in math, like Pythagoras, while some may be intelligent in the visual arts, like Monet. I believe that you can't measure intelligence, not in a way that it is a 100 % reliable and true. So, my suggestion is to forget about who is smarter and who can divide a polynomial equation faster and just to go on with our lives.

Humans are complicated machines. They feel emotions, they feel sadness, they feel pity, they feel (or at least some do) empathy, yet at the same time they keep on killing each other over matters of surreal things, over the belief of beings we don't know that exist. As smart as we may seem, I can assure you, we're also that much stupid. Lions kill each other to get the prey or the food, we kill each other to prove that a certain way of thought is true and all others are false.

Humans have created and invented all they have invented to be able to make up for their vulnerability. We invented electricity because before its invention, at night, we could be left at dark by a gust of wind with a tiger spying on us, who can see much, much better than us in the dark. Then came bulbs and electricty, then came night vision goggles; and this invention process will go on, until nothing natural is left on earth.  Humans, the "intelligent" animals, will continue to destroy their habitat and each other until the end of time; now, where's the intelligence in that?

Our Sinister Friends

Everyday, when I come home, I wash my hands, grab a bite or two, sit down and do my homework, and then play the piano. If I try to change one of these “rituals”, my afternoon would be messed up and I probably wouldn't be able to do the things that I needed to do. These things we call habits are the parts of our personalities which make us unique; they complete the emptiness in our lives and distinguish us from each other. However, they may be easily compared to addictions- even though they are not at all the same; at first, they seem harmless and just like normal sets of actions, but when you realize that you’re doing them all the time –and that is, if you do  realize it- they are very, very hard to get rid of.

What do we understand when we say habit? Habits are actions we have to do in order to keep on living the way we are living currently. They are things we accomplish or say, sometimes without thinking about them. For example, we say “Afiyet Olsun” in Turkish when we are leaving the dinner table. You might say that that is not a habit, but a tradition: but if you trace the traditions back in time, you will see that all traditions actually come from habits. Okonkwo eating bowls of food made by each of his wives, is his habit, which has sprung from his roots, his traditions. Also, saying “Afiyet Olsun”, is also a habit of me, enforced by our traditions and the Turkish culture. Sometimes, when traditions become habits, they become too strong to deny.

Sometimes, habits start out as something we have to do, like wearing a tie to work; but as time passes, this act may grow on someone and they may start to wear ties when going to the market or out for a walk. In the harvesting season, Okonkwo wakes up every morning to go out and do work on the farm. After this long session of continuous work everyday, when the dry season arrives, Okonkwo finds himself to be craving for something to do and to work on. His work, to harvest yams, to tend his farm, has become one of his habits and once that is taken away from him, he feels empty and useless. This is also the reason why control freaks and people with OCD's get so attached to their habits; they need things to fill up their lives and to go according to plan.

Habits are the actions we take, the things we say which make us human and unique. They are like a new pets we have; first, they feel out of place, but then they grow on us and fit in. A habit may be to look at the corridor when you hear someone's footsteps, expecting them, even though that someone may be deceased, or to eat three bowls of food every night. They may be considered to be sinister, they sneak up on us and find their places in our personality,become our "friends", and then they grow on us, making it very hard to get rid of them - if we ever want to.