within you without you

We were talking-about the space between us all And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion Never glimpse the truth-then it's far too late-when they pass away. We were talking-about the love we all could share-when we find it To try our best to hold it there-with our love With our love-we could save the world-if they only knew. Try to realize it's all within yourself No-one else can make you change And to see you're really only very small, And life flows ON within you and without you. We were talking-about the love that's gone so cold and the people, Who gain the world and lose their soul- They don't know-they can't see-are you one of them? When you've seen beyond yourself-then you may find, peace of mind, Is waiting there-And the time will come when you see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you

- george harrison

bit all my fingernails tonight

y'all don't understand

the pain i feel.

i miss you george,

in this world

please come back

it's not too late.

musings from the train - on love

 so i, in consultation with the leading experts in the field, have come to the conclusion that falling in love is a chemical and biological reaction that leaves the affected person with no ability to reason and function for the duration of the said reaction and hence without any consideration of long term well-being. it may of course, out of pure luck, turn out that love leads some of us to better futures but no one can deny that the intensity of feelings we experience during the reaction have no bearing on the success of the relationship as a whole or for any specific time frame. take me for instance. as chet baker says, i fall in love so easily i fall in love so fast. just humming the song in my head makes me wanna fall in love with him but that's beside the point. so yes, i do. no offense to exboyfriends, i fell in love with each one of you for different but perfectly great reasons as you all excel in countless ways. except you. and you know who you are. but when i look back i remember that i thought i could possibly not love anyone more for each and every relationship.  i totally kid myself into thinking with each relationship, i reached the top! oh and yes, i was also completely blind to any barriers that would otherwise (to a regular human being) seem insurmountable. because love knows no boundaries, right! yeah right :) and love changes people, no? when you direct a significant amount of your compassion to a single person, it can do wonders!  lazy asses like myself, become action-people. you want bubblegum? let me run for a mile to the nearest store. got a backache? let me get the lotion and rub you down for an hour! and the action-loving ones (like myself again, yes i am very versatile) stay glued to the tv to watch the world snooker championships (no not me i swear). hey, it's a beautiful day and my friends are having a bbq, but i'll stay in with the shades down only to cuddle with you!  ok ok i know we all sacrifice things for each other but you know we are going with our best sides forward when we are in love. so come on people, agree with me, falling in love is an anomaly, falling in love is a reaction, falling in love is chemical, falling in love is not us, falling in love is not unique, falling in love is crazy! not to say we don't want to experience any of those things...and really i am not writing this to suggest  that falling in love is something we should try to avoid, on the contrary, i think it is good to jolt oneself out of the monotony of life, explore our limits as well as others', lose our usual everyday cockiness, determination, selfishness, and forget about our friends and family for a little while.  especially knowing that we will get all that back, in due time!

poor me

i went swimming with old friends

and the waves broke into stones

they were not the beautiful waves of your hair

i haven't seen in so long

in them

i saw you

absorbed in your self-centeredness

unforgiving and forgetting

went to national civil rights museum in memphis. so sad how the civil rights movement has stopped short of bringing race equality . memphis is still divided, as are most towns in the south. even in the north. by railroad tracks. crossed by no one from either side. unless you are chasing a runaway pet.

WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF MY LIFE?

my life is a circle 

fiery like the sun

my life is heart-shaped

with enough love for everyone

my life takes the shape 

of your beautiful face

my life is a line

with a beginning and an end.

lost

to love and not want the whole world. (like if you eat too much you get fat.)

but there was nothing to eat. except for a sandwich,
with peanut butter that looked like shit.

and you certainly couldn't take a shit.
because there was no toilet paper.
you could use your underwear of course
to wipe off.
still, the bathroom, did not have a door.
and there was no toilet paper.

you couldn't sleep.
because if your sleep was too deep,
you wouldn't hear them call your name.

who are these people with me.
they want water they want toilet paper
where is the humanity?
we are not animals!
at this point, humanity escapes me.

to be with you, is all i want.

somebody is dying out on the street. i can hear him scream. my next door neighbors are having sex again. when they first moved in, she used to scream, too. now just like his, her voice is muffled, just like his, her heartbeat is faltering. the world continues to fuck them both. neither of them care. i hear the ambulance, the police. they are closing off the street that i walk on every day.

their lives are taken.
your mind is racing.
but you tap your watch, is it broken?

the rain is falling.
as you lean back on the concrete floor.
but you don't hear it.
you don't hear me.

one more child is born.
one more name is called.
it's never going to be over.

you know you are going to cry.
when it's all over.

my mom loves duck...

the blind assassin

-from Captain Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

the salad of love

the salad of love
Originally uploaded by ergeneman.

from a man without a country, by kurt vonnegut

Here's a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding.
We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no mantter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

in the park 

And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

Leonard Cohen

hold my hand
and when i am too high i will come down your stairs.

the blue light comes in. the blue light goes out. the blue light carries me with it into a night. a night whose magic has died. i have been here at another time. standing staring at the sky without a single star, i had crouched over the the ground, my hands touching my shoulders my face, loving what is now unloved. you, my sun, my scented candle, my child-proof lighter, my reading lamp, you have burned yourself out. i now wait for the day to break; it did that night. and i will be happy as i was when i fell in love with you.

on my lips you are the red stain
that remains
after the wine is
gone.

nerde olmak istedim biliyo musun birden? hani culebrita vardı ya snorkeling yapmıştık, o kocaman manyak simetrik yaratıkları birbirimize hayretle göstermiştik. kafalarımız denizle dolu ama bomboş, aklımız sevimli bir balığın peşinde kalbimiz göğüslerimiz kadar hafif. evet çok özledim artik seni. hadi koy şapkanın altına bir j, inelim merdivenden suya, kıyıya yüzelim yavaş yavaş, içimiz kıpır kıpır ama. sonra oturalım yamuk bir kayaya, yakalım, yakılalalım, değiştirelim bu dünyayı, daraltalım merceği denize, tekneye, ayaklarımızın altındakı yuvarlanmış renkli cam şişe parçalarına. gülelim, sen japon ol, ben ince sesler çıkarayım, yerlere yatalım, nasıl geri döneceğimizi tartışalım, nasıl burada kalabiliriz diye planlar yapalım. tekne uzak, hayatlarımız daha da uzak kalsın, hiçbir şey farketmesin biz orada oldukça.

from my window. the truck on the right sells mexican fast food. i haven't been drunk enough to try it.  

my aunt on the left my mom on the right. why do i get to wear white socks? 

my dad and me. i love the pink sweater, no?  

ozge and i were almost getting our haircuts here this weekend. but it was too scary inside! 

i wake up in the middle of the night. i don't have to pee. i am not cold. i am not thirsty. i haven't had a bad dream. it is an unwelcome interruption i don't know what to do with. unwanted thoughts appear, the ones i want to forget, bury, wipe out, secretly toss, drop. drop like you would a piece of trash when nobody is looking and pretend it was never there. so it joins the heap of rubbish thoughts and feelings once possessed now orphaned.
the world does not know time. these days the world and me are not one. buried in my books, leafing through my past, washing my clothes off familiar scents, eating my dreams away like chicken salad sandwiches from lincoln diner. before late, i'm on the last page of a book, the food is consumed, clothes folded. how can life be boring when there is so much you overlooked. how could i forget those nights when i couldn't wait for my parents to leave so i would do the little things i do when i'm alone. there was never enough time then and there is never enough time now. soon the car will be pulling into the parking lot and me racing through the little apartment throwing myself in bed pretending to be asleep. and sleep.

just like i did when i was in second grade, when we used to live in that apartment overlooking a busy street, i sit by my window and watch the cars go by. then i look at pictures from years ago. in one, i look like a boy but i am winking a flirty wink. in another, my mom sits in the background, she seems calm but i know how young she is and how she wants to break free. yet she is smiling her smile for me and seeing it makes me want to make her smile like that again. i still wear the tomboy clothes i used to wear - the cargo pants, the long-sleeved retro shirt and a man's cap. i just bough the cap a couple of weeks ago, only to fund out that i had borrowed the same one from some guest some twenty years ago.
i read the notes my mom has jotted behind the photos. and i wish i could use language like she does. she gives people a voice they never had, she makes them come alive. her narrative is just too strong, it is too funny. and sometimes, when she becomes the voice of my half-blind now dead cat, it is sad.
and then i wish i was a more exciting kid. so the years of her youth that she gave me would be worth it. i start watching the cars again, hoping that she will call me to the dinner table. anytime now.

rainy day in new york city

a day to think of friends. a day to sit by the bar at a diner and talk to the old lady sitting next to me. a day to have thoughts that reach deep down only to let them go one by one. and read about vishnu, keeper of the universe, keeper of the sun:

" I am what you taste in water, I am what you see in air. I am the breath in every flower, I am the life in every creature. I am all living things, I am creation itself. Look at me and see in my body the whole universe."

-from the death of vishnu

should we go outside, when you go away?

strange smells
of cigarettes smoking of wood burning of cucumbers melons
sounds
of me calling

i say the things i always say, my eyes always burn
and the knot in my stomach, for some reason,
does not come loose.

i have so many questions
that i will not ask
i am on my island and i know the answers will never come.

so my heart beats to the beat
my life floats
but still i wish, the spirals i draw
could reach you somehow.

true. 

i liked this dailyom message i got a few days ago

from Giants in the Earth

There were the walls, for example, of which he himself was especially proud, and which Store-Hans never tired of admiring. He had begun work on these walls immediately after he had returned from the trip east to the Hallings' with the potatoes. The lime had been mixed according to directions, and spread over the walls- three coats of it, no less; now the sod hut shone so brightly inside that it dazzled the eyes... Before the snow came, Beret thought it delightful to have such walls; but after there was nothing but whiteness outside- pure whiteness as far as the eye could see and the thought could reach- she regretted that he had touched them. Her eyes were blinded wherever she looked, either outdoors or indoors; the black-brown earthen floor was the only object on which she could rest them comfortably; and so she always looked down now, as she sat in the house.

- O.E. Rolvaag

i am sending smoke signals. can you see them? can you read them?

i am making a paper snowflake out of my life. as i cut the little pieces off, i am not sure how my flake will to turn out. every dash i make i have some hope that it will be striking once the paper is opened. i go this way and that way and with every turn the scissor takes i know the shape will be there to stay. and after every cut i make i open the paper. sometimes a seemingly boring cut turns out so intricate on the other end. the cuts that are elaborate, that wave in and out, are mostly disastrous. but sometimes they are not. then i am soo happy that i ever made them. soon the paper will have too many cuts. and i will not be there to open it. somebody else will look at it and decide if it is beautiful.

you can make them, too.

your heart is an empty room

Burn it down till the embers smoke on the ground
And start new when your heart is an empty room
With walls of the deepest blue

-dcftc

complete silence on my mind. thoughts feelings falling like snow, melting away as they touch my body. with all the clocks stopped, my heart is keeping time.

years have gone by. i have grown, my cells have multiplied, but i have given them away so i can stay constant. so i can come back and find the same me, the bare me, that doesn't change. it hurts to give but i don't want to unlearn how to do it. i am afraid that i will and i will start swelling up with feelings i can't unpart from, with thoughts that pile up and stink like rubbish, like old thoughts do. i don't want to grow cold, distant, i don't want to grow old and burst when one day some sunshine leaks in from the blinds that keep my house dark and dreary. i want to be alive, i want to close my eyes and take a leap and fall fall fall until i wake up and find that i am still there, even if nobody else is next to me. i want to be alive, even if it means i have to cry, even if i have to lose. for losing is living and i don't want to be afraid.

Noel Abla.

my first try in movie editing. this is ozge skiing into the fog. watch her hat. the music is by east village opera company. the song is the flower duet redux...

from the blind assassin

why does she keep arriving? is he some private game she's playing, is that it? he won't let her pay for anything, he won't be bought. she wants a love story out of him because girls do, or girls of her type who still expect something from life. but there must be another angle. the wish for revenge, or for punishment. women have curious ways of hurting someone else. they hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. then he finds out. then his dick falls off. despite those eyes, the pure line of her throat, he catches a glimpse in her at times of something complex and smirched.

-margaret atwood

from dark star safari

i told him what i felt about time exposing the truth- that time did not heal wounds, but that the passsing years gave us a vantage point from which to see the reality of things. i added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit detector into a highly-calibrated instrument.

- paul theroux

the mouse is cute. but, the mouse has to go, said ozge, it is dirty it will make us sick. she is not here to kill the mouse so i will have to figure out another way. i remember when my first fish died i could not get him out of the tank. i sat down on the stairs and cried and i wasn’t even a kid. and now, how am i going to get the mouse, it has ears!

i am happy to have the mouse. to know i am not alone and to know he will never try to give me advice like everybody else these days. not that i don’t need it. and not that i don’t ask for it. you see, i am a little lost, just floating around somewhere in the cold winter sky. ever since that palm reader told me it is not a good year to make decisions i have given up making them altogether. she also said i should become a massage therapist.

don’t forget, you are not alone, said my dailyom email the other day. remember life is hard for everyone. but i wish i had a tiger, too. instead of a mouse. then the two of us could go sledding down the hill, and forget all our troubles.

Song For A Winter's Night

The lamp is burning low upon my table top,
The snow is softly falling.
The air is still in the silence of my room.
I hear your voice softly calling.
If I could only have you near,
To breathe a sigh or two,
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love.
On this winter night with you.

The smoke is rising in the shadows overhead,
My glass is almost empty.
I read again between the lines upon each page;
The words of love you sent me.
If I could know within my heart,
That you were lonely too,
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love.
Upon this winter night with you.

The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim,
The shades of night are lifting.
The morning light steals across my window pane,
Where webs of snow are drifting.
If I could only have you near,
To breathe a sigh or two,
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love,
Upon this winter night with you,
And to be once again with you.

- Gordon Lightfoot

hubel

hubel
Originally uploaded by minikkafa.

by gorkem, again.

When I have fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace,
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

- John Keats

i am waiting. just like everything comes everything will go. one by one. my tears will dry one by one. the fish will die, knots will come loose, my boobs will sag, my whole left shoe will become a hole itself and oh my god i will be able to take a breath and then it will start again. i will be waiting.

and why,
do i want to get in a shell
be a hermicrab
so someone picks me up
from the bottom of a sea
maybe 5000 miles away
(and i am so happy, delirious, because it was so secluded you know and slow and monotonous. anything could happen now, i'm going up up up, the sun is getting closer, where am i being taken?)
to a place, with air
but no more water
and no more food
(and oh no i cannot breathe, i am dying, i have to get out, good bye my shell, i have to go...)
then i get out, to crawl among objects unfamiliar, i feel dizzy yet i have to persist.
i am all dry, drier every second and i am getting smaller, less confident, an alien, and i shouldn't admit it
but i might be dying.
i want to be a hermicrab again.

The Real Story of the First Thanksgiving

By Benjamin Franklin (1785)

“There is a tradition that in the planting of New England, the first settlers met with many difficulties and hardships, as is generally the case when a civiliz’d people attempt to establish themselves in a wilderness country. Being so piously dispos’d, they sought relief from heaven by laying their wants and distresses before the Lord in frequent set days of fasting and prayer. Constant meditation and discourse on these subjects kept their minds gloomy and discontented, and like the children of Israel there were many dispos’d to return to the Egypt which persecution had induc’d them to abandon.

“At length, when it was proposed in the Assembly to proclaim another fast, a farmer of plain sense rose and remark’d that the inconveniences they suffer’d, and concerning which they had so often weary’d heaven with their complaints, were not so great as they might have expected, and were diminishing every day as the colony strengthen’d; that the earth began to reward their labour and furnish liberally for their subsistence; that their seas and rivers were full of fish, the air sweet, the climate healthy, and above all, they were in the full enjoyment of liberty, civil and religious.

“He therefore thought that reflecting and conversing on these subjects would be more comfortable and lead more to make them contented with their situation; and that it would be more becoming the gratitude they ow’d to the divine being, if instead of a fast they should proclaim a thanksgiving. His advice was taken, and from that day to this, they have in every year observ’d circumstances of public felicity sufficient to furnish employment for a Thanksgiving Day, which is therefore constantly ordered and religiously observed.”

rating life

i just took this test that is supposed to rate different aspects of your life as well as your overall life quality. i am not so sure i agree with it though as my worse category ended up being the friends/family one! have i been deceiving myself for so long thinking my relationship with both are what keep me going???

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.3
Mind:	7.7
Body:	7.5
Spirit:	6.8
Friends/Family:	5.1
Love:	6.2
Finance:	7.7
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

in palais de tokyo

this one is really in color. gorkem with the camera.
wonderful museum...

my dad in his wonderfully tidy office
photo by ali göktan.

i have four walls around me i have pictures of a window that opens up to the outside. i listen to the radio and i sit here wanting to get out but i don’t know where to go. wherever i go i reach wall that surrounds me. I hit the wall and the wall hits me back and with a thump i go down. i get heavier and heavier and think that i will soon fall through the floor. i have fish that stare at me, every month it is a different fish and towards the end of the month the eyes of the fish lose their brightness and you know they would smell if they were really here. the fish change and I change and i hope that they won’t die as they always do. so i am sitting, there is no use standing up.

gorkita again.