Merci, Monsieur Marceau

In autumn 1986 he gave me about an hour of his life. We talked about Auschwitz and love, about language and absolution, about Chaplin and apartheid, about poetry, Picasso and power, about resistance and reconciliation, about . . .

At one point he said: Shshsh, and now let's five minutes talk without words.

Magic? Eyes talking. No ears needed. Silence. Thoughts flowing, waving. Question and answer dancing. Dreams. Understanding? Yes. It is possible. Magic!

May the one and the other think I am (too) sentimental: Afterwards I felt these had been very special moments in my life. I had personally met a wonderful wise human being.

So, what could I say about this poet who did not need words?

With the implicit understanding that James will take it as what it is thought to be - a compliment for his wonderful idea - I do ask you to visit him at nourishing obscurity:

There you will find all the words which right now don't come easy to me.

. . .

. . .

The importance of being E(a)rnest II

New chapter in the most thrilling case Ernest Chambers vs. God.

In a letter signed "God" the accused invokes immunity from "some earthly laws".

Read more here.

My closest friend says he feels reminded of certain human mass murders who would not accept the International Criminal Court by choosing almost the same reasons.
But he says also that he is sure Mr Chambers will insist on the defendant's appearance in person. "And he will focus on the tiny word some, argue that immunity from some earthly laws implicates that for some earthly laws the defendant does not invoke immunity."

Obviously to be continued.

Another Lip Service Day (for Peace)

As said, today is another Lip Service Day: The so-called International Day of Peace.

What's about Famine-Day?

Or will all the actions fill but one little stomach? Today? Right now? The stomach of any child soundless whining at its mother's breast which has no milk?

What is yoga as peace in action but naively acting for the sake of acting?

Peace Day? Or just another day for wheeling and dealing?

Pay Day?

Did you already order the Better World Shopping Guide?
Its FREE ... ehem . . . With your tax deductible donation of $20

Or the better world HANDBOOK?
It's even a bit freer . . . With your tax deductible donation of $50

- - -

Ah, perhaps today I am a little unfair with some nonprofit organisations.

Therefore: only those feeling blamed and insulted by what I wrote above ... only those are meant.

And now for something not completely different.

Today's Peace Day reminds me of the first poem in many many years that I spontaneously wrote in February 2003, when heinous warmongers pulled the strings and let their illiterate puppet threaten the "alliance of the unwilling" by saying "You're either with us, or against us."

New World Order

Those
pleading for peace
without diplomacy
are being taught:
You are an enemy.

- - -

According to Tetrapilotomos the puppet, which barefaced claimed to be a "peaceloving person" could have also declared: "Peace is not of vital interest to my masters. God bless me ... eh, them."

"To tell the truth", Tetrapilotomos went on, "I'd rather prefer that one day will be said about these and other masters, their puppets and other useful idiots, what in 1588 was a dictum in England: 'God blew his breath, and they were scattered.' Of course, absolute peacefully, and it needn't be a celestial being; a tiny little butterfly in the Amazonian rainforest would do."

Much ado about doing not much

Coincidence?

Yesterday, I quoted my closest friend, Tetrapilotomos:

"Sometimes I think: Past is. Is presence. Impossible to let bygones be bygones or even forget about. It’s there. Is presence. And maybe herein lies the reason that we remain unable to learn from the past."

What I had not been aware: Yesterday was so-called Children's Day. In Germany.

At night I read one of these BBC-Listeners from 1959, which - to my great delight - I had only recently rediscovered in a "forgotten" box.

And I found this advert.

Yes. Past is. Is presence. Nothing changed.

Why?

It is not due to any existing or not existing God's will. It is a - perhaps ... probably the infamy of mankind.

And today is another Lip Service Day . . .

And tomorrow . . .

Nazim Hikmet had a dream

Nazim Hikmet had a dream:

Yaşamak bir ağaç gibi tek ve hür
ve bir orman gibi kardeşçesine,
bu hasret bizim.

To live like a tree and at liberty
and brotherly like the trees of a forest,
this yearning is ours.

- - -

Thus spake my closest friend, Tetrapilotomos:
"Sometimes I think: Past is. Is presence. Impossible to let bygones be bygones or even forget about. It’s there. Is presence. And maybe herein lies the reason that we remain unable to learn from the past."

- - -

The following poem by Hikmet is dedicated, especially to those being in power in Turkey, pretending to love the(ir?) country, pretending to be the most democratic democrats ever on Turkish soil and under Turkish sun, pretending to be guarantors of free speech and guardians of freedom of opinion, and who - like most of their predecessors - have banned Nazim Hikmet’s books from public libraries.
I LOVE MY COUNTRY

I love my country :
I have swung on its plane trees, I have stayed in its prisons.
Nothing can overcome my spleen
as the songs and tobacco of my country.

My country :
Bedreddin, Sinan, Yunus Emre and Sakarya,
lead domes and factory chimneys
are all the work of my people
who even hiding from themselves
smile under their drooping mustaches.

My country.
My country is so large :
it seems that it is endless to go around.
Edirné, Izmir, Ulukıshla, Marash, Trabzon, Erzurum.
I know the Erzurum plateau only in its songs
and I am ashamed
not to have crossed Tauruses even once
to go to the cotton pickers
in the south.

My country :
camels, train, Fords and sick donkeys,
poplar
willow
and red earth.

My country.
The trout which likes
pine forests, best freshwaters and the lakes
at the top of mountains,
and at least half a kilo,
with red reflections on its scaleless, silver skin
swims in the Abant lake of Bolu.

My country :
goats on the Ankara plain :
the sheen of blond, silky, long furs.
The fat plump hazelnuts of Giresun.
The fragrant red-cheeked apples of Amasya,
olive
fig
melon
and of all colours
bunches and bunches of grapes
and then the plough
and then the black ox
and then : ready to accept
everything
advanced, beautiful and good
with the joyous admiration of a child
my hard-working, honest, brave people
half hungry, half full
half slave...

tr. by Fuat Engin

The Importance of being E(a)rnest

Mr Ernest W. Chambers once again proves the importance of his being: The 70-year-old Senator of Nebraska (U.S.A.) sues God.

My closest friend Tetrapilotomos first reaction: "I am relieved Mr Chambers did not sue God's wife, too. The more I am looking forward to the trial. It would be interesting to see how Mrs. God manages the earthly affairs, while her husband is living behind bars in his own country."

A Listener for Readers

A Listener for Readers

Tonight I shall have a nice drop of wine on the 299th

anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth.

And I do feel glad having a "treasure" to share with connoisseurs of the English language. The following article
was published in the BBC's Weekly,

The Listener, September 24, 1959, Vol. LXII. No. 1591

Enjoy reading.

Dr. Samuel Johnson after 250 Years

Ian Watt on the literature of experience


We can hardly talk about literature without using the standard oppositions between art and life, form and meaning, imagination and experience. But these antitheses are obviously misleading in many ways; one way is to make us think so highly of ‘art’, ‘form’ and ‘imagination’ that we undervalue the many kinds of writing whose main qualities are not peculiar to literature, writing whose matter is so close to common experience that we do not think of it as imaginative, and whose manner is so much that of ordinary human discourse that it hardly occurs to us to discuss its literary form. The distinction between the world of art and of life becomes irrelevant in extreme cases of this kind of writing, because both their subject-matter and their mode of communication are common to both: such, for example, are the diary, the letter, the memoir, the prayer; and sometimes these modes of expression attain a measure of performance, and thus enter the vast category of writing to which one can give the name of experience. The greatest English writer whose work belongs mainly to this category is Samuel Johnson.

When, fifty years ago, Walter Raleigh celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth, the terms of his eulogy illustrated one way in which the antithesis between life and arttends to be unfair to the literature of experience:
‘Johnson’, he asserted ‘was an author almost by accident; it is the man who is dear to us’.
The question is whether the man is not dear to us mainly
through the greatness of the author; and it cannot be said
that the question, though much debated, has yet been
resolved. Raleigh certainly did much to end the relative decline in Johnson's reputation which set in soon after his death, and to suggest the main directions which subsequent interest in Johnson was to take; but whereas the general tendency of thought in the last fifty years has confirmed and amplified Raleigh's admiration of the man, it seems to have made it even more difficult to come to terms with the greatness of the author.

Modern trends in the Interpretation of Johnson the man are
not easy to summarize. Johnson's contemporary, George III, allegedly never discovered how the apple got inside the
apple-dumpling; perhaps one can say that new knowledge and new insights have enabled us to uncover in Johnson, beneath the portentous crust of the intimidating portraits, the polysyllabic prose, and the oracular clubman presented by Boswell, a human being who belongs to the world of our own ordinary pleasures and interests and perplexities more
completely than any other writer.

Both the difficulties of Johnson's life and the magnitude of his triumph over them were of exceptional proportions. From childhood on he suffered from the King’s Evil, a tuberculous infection that scarred his face and left him with one eye almost blind; he grew up in an unhappy home which offered little prospect for the future beyond his father’s declining bookshop; he was afflicted with an uncontrollable constitutional nervousness which made him mutter to himself and twitch convulsively; and by the age of nineteen he knew that at any moment what he called, his ‘vile melancholy’ was likely to develop into complete and per­manent madness.

Then came the brief days at Oxford of the angry young man
from the provinces: his contemporaries remembered him as
gay, but he knew well enough that ‘it was bitterness which
they mistook for frolic’.

All this side of the biography, hardly touched on by Boswell, has now been painstakingly filled out by many scholars, and its psychological implications interpreted. Their work makes clear the considerable role which the modern climate of thought, and especially Freud, has played in increasing our understanding of the courage and re-source with which
Johnson warded off the menace of insanity. In Johnson
Agonistes, as Bertrand Bronson has called him in a now classic study, we recognize and salute one of the great heroes of the wars of the mind.

Other changes in outlook have increased our sympathetic
under­standing of Johnson’s attitude to life. The Whig view of history, for example, has been sufficiently challenged for us to recognize that there was considerable basis for Johnson’s Tory anathemas on the social and political tendencies of his time; while the main events of the twentieth Century have vindicated Johnson's pronouncement that ‘the history of mankind is little else than a narration of designs that have failed and hopes that have been disappointed’.

Johnson’s political pessimism was based on his acute under­
standing of the darker elements in human nature. He could
hardly assent to the doctrine of progress when he was
convinced that ‘there may be community of material
possessions, but there can never be community of love and
esteem’; and the whole liberal conception of the democratic
pursuit of happiness inevitably seemed unreal to someone
who, when asked if he really believed that ‘a man was not
sometimes happy in the moment that was present’, answered:
‘ Never, but when he is drunk’.

Johnson's psychological pessimism - or realism, if you like -
enabled him to achieve a posthumous topicality in many other ways. He was, for example, the supreme exponent of One-Upman-ship; and Boswell's Life is, among other things, a record of the vigour and variety of his tactics: witness, for
example, Johnson's rejection of Boswell's offer to tell him all about Allan Ramsay’s pastoral drama The Gentle Shepherd.

‘No, Sir, I won't learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it’.
Johnson, then, had as keen an awareness of the corruptions of pride and envy as La Rochefoucauld. But he was also,
fortunately, aware of much else. His great capacity for
cheerfulness kept breaking in on his conviction of human
inadequacy; and this, combined with his naturally impetuous and insubordinate nature, did much to qualify the toryism which is the usual result of a pressing sense of man's weakness, greed, and irrationality. Johnson strongly opposed the ‘prevailing spirit’ of his time, which he defined as ‘a dislike of all established forms, merely because they are established’; but if his view that ' the cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical but palliative' made him oppose anything in the nature of radical reform, it did not turn him into a complacent sup­porter of the status quo. He never forgot the need for ‘palliatives’ and his belief that ‘a decent pro-vision for the poor is the true test of a civilization’ might well have led him to welcome the Welfare State.

Johnson’s philosophical, psy­chological, and political views,
then, have become much more congenial to us than they were to the nineteenth Century; our general mistrust of theory makes us welcome Johnson’s famous attacks on “the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception’, while our residual liberalism is satisfied by Johnson’s eloquent departure from his own precept when he enunciated one sovereign principle of judgment: ‘I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty’.

But it may be felt that all this is beside the point; that we
can, no doubt - following our personal tastes - applaud
Johnson the High Churchman or Johnson the gormandizer,
John­son the patriot or Johnson the punster; but that the only important question is not whether the Great Cham was a great chap, or even the brightest Ornament in the casebooks of self-psychotherapy, but, simply, whether he was a great writer.
The answer, simply, is yes. But the case is difficult to argue,
especially in the present critical climate.
For one thing, Raleigh was in a sense right when he said
Johnson ‘was an author almost by accident’. In the days of his fame, when someone complimented Johnson on his legal knowledge and remarked that he might have become Lord Chancellor if he had chosen the law as a career, Johnson was much distressed, and answered: ‘Why will you vex me by suggesting this when it is too late?’ Most of his published works were commissioned - from the first of them, a translation for a provincial bookseller, to his greatest literary achievements, the Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets.

Johnson is perhaps the supreme example of a great writer with very little sense of a specifically literary vocation. This,
however, may not be as disabling as it sounds. For two
reasons: first, the notion of the literary vocation as something special and set apart is not necessarily the best one, and is certainly relatively new historically; and, secondly, Johnson had his own conception of his role which, though contrary to some more recent ones, was perfectly adapted to his own particular literary powers. Soon after Johnson's death the Romantics established their image of the writer as a lonely genius exploring strange seas of thought and feeling; and today this conception retains much of its power. With this stereotype goes a conception of literature as an equally special and separate kind of expression; and this idea, which is strongly supported by symbolist and formalist doctrines, has only recently been widely challenged in favour of a more literal an rational outlook.

Johnson’s idea of literature, and of the role of the writer, was certainly not in the role of tradition begun by the Romantics. If he thought of himself as an 'artist', it was in its eighteenth-century sense of a skilled craftsman; and his conception of how he should use his craft laid primary emphasis on his kinship with his fellow human beings: ‘The only end of writing’ was 'to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it’. So Johnson’s best early works in verse - London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and in prose the Rambler papers - were moral essays, discursive modes of writing which were, as he put it, eminently adapted to ‘the propagation of truth’ and ‘the dignity of virtue’. Their manner was primarily rational and expository; Johnson insisted on the virtues of what he called ‘dogged veracity’. His psychological need to control ‘the hunger of the imagination which preys upon itself’ made him rather uneasy in the presence of fanciful and the fictional; and it is typical of him that the best parts of his quasi-novel Rasselas could easily be essay from the Rambler.

Potential and Achievement

This literal and didactic tendency, so out of keeping with
recent literary fashion, was undoubtedly an important cause of what has been widely felt as a discrepancy between Johnson’s potential and his actual literary achievement. The Vanity of Human Wishes is one of the supreme poems of the Century, but Johnson obviously fell short of the bulk which is necessary to major poetic status; partly because his sense of moral and religious responsibility was so intense that it did not lend itself easily to poetry - he considered religion ‘the great, the necessary, the inevitable business of human life’, but he also held that ‘contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul cannot be poetical’. On the other hand, unlike Boswell, he had little interest in the commonest outlet for the literal and realist habit of mind - self-expression; so it is not surprising that the bulk of Johnson’s writings are of a miscellaneous and occasional kind.

Few of us would deny Sir James Murrav’s estimate that in
Johnson’s hands the dictionary ‘became a department of
literature’; nor would we dissent from Logan Pearsall Smith’s expert appraisal of Johnson as our supreme aphorist: but we hardly know how to rank these two genres in th e literary hierarchy. We like wit and brevity and analytic power, but the definition and the aphorism seem much too short-winded and discontinuous to rank as major literary creations; and both are essentially occa­sional - supremely so in the Dictionary, where every word was a new and unavoidable challenge.

To no one else, surely, can we better apply Johnson’s own
definition: ‘True genius is a mind of large general powers,
accidentally determined in some particular direction’; his union of formidable analytic power with immediate command of memorable verbal expression needed only aa appropriate eliciting occasion, whether in a literary task or in the occasions of daily life. This poses further critical problems. First, we must learn how to deal with writing which was not intended as literature at all. The famous private Letter to Lord Chesterfield is not surpassed by any of his public writings, and the great gifts found in The Vanity of Human Wishes are as fully manifested in some of Johnson’s private prayers and in his letters.

Seriousness in Conversation
Secondly, it is even more difficult to come to critical terms
with Johnson’s conversation. When Boswell remarked ‘But I
wonder, Sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing’, Johnson refused to be drawn: ‘Sir. you may wonder’. It seems clear that conversation was Johnson’s most natural means of expression - perhaps because there the stimulus was varied and immediate. In any case, just as Johnson's moral sense made the distinction between public and private writing unimportant, so it meant that he put as much seriousness and energy into his conversation as into his writing. He ' laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion and in every Company '; and to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put in'. Consequently, Fanny Burney' could not help remarking how . . . much the same thing it was to hear h i m or to read him'; while Johnson's conversation offers as impressive evidence as bis writings of the variety of his powers, from what Boswell described as 'the majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom ', to the greatest of the English humorists».

Humour it another literary quality which has not yet received justice. In general it can be regarded as a supremely inclusive response to the complexities of experience; and a response whose success requires great gifts of sensitiveness and imagination. Mrs. Thrale tells of a Lincolnshire lady who was ill-advised enough to show Johnson the underground grotto in her garden, and then enquire complacently ‘if he did not think it would be a pretty convenient habitation?’ ‘I think it would, Madam’, he replied — ‘for a toad’. The retort was rude; but not
gratuitously so, because at soon as Johnson was summoned
to endorse a grotto as a convenient human habitation he felt himself bound to remind the Lincolnshire lady that civilization has progressed from living in caves to living in houses only through long and patient efforts, and that it can continue only on such terms.
To do justice to Johnson's literary achievement, then, we must include the totality of his recorded utterances: the
conversations and the various marginal kinds of writing, as
well as the poems, the essays and the Lives of the Poets. This means that we must usually judge Johnson’s content on the basis of literal as opposed to imaginative truth.

This is what the literature of experience usually demands, but it is contrary to most modern critical theory, with its insistence on the literary artefact as an autonomous verbal structure best considered as separate both from its author and from any relation to real life. Obviously the correspondence of an author’s statements to reality or truth is even more difficult to establish than intrinsic literary excellence where we can at least find all - or most - of the evidence on the page before us. We must also remember that there is a real danger in confusing art and life; for one thing, it tends to authorize the common 'let's have no nonsense' sort of Philistinism, and Johnson had many admirers in this camp: Raleigh himself as Virginia Woolf noted, in his later years 'ceased to profess literature, and became instead a Professor of Life'.

Truthful Vision of Human Experience

But the other extreme position is even more impossible; we
may not want to go as far as Johnson did in disregarding the distinctions between literature and life, but we obviously cannot disregard the whole tradition of wisdom literature, from the Book of Ecclesiastes to Montaigne and Pascal, or all the other writings in which man has faced and recorded his actual thoughts and feelings. Johnson’s own works and reported utterances no doubt constitute a dispersed, untidy, and awkward body of material for the critic to see as a whole, but that whole constitutes an impressively eloquent, consistent, and truthful vision of human experience.

I have said little about Johnson’s writings as such, but I will
close by letting him speak for himself, all too briefly, in one of the supreme examples of the literature of experience. Perhaps the most famous example of Johnson’s literalism is his attack Milton’s Lycidas: 'Where there is leisure for fiction’, he said, ‘there is little grief'. Johnson’s elegy ‘On the Death of Dr. Level’ is an absolutelv direct treatment of the death of a member of his household, described by Boswell as ‘an obscure practiser in phvsic, of a strange, grotesque appearance’. The poem was written hardly a year before Johnson’s own death, and in it all his friendship and humanity was framed by a steady of mankind's limitations:

Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By suddenblasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year
See Levet to the grave descent;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of ev'ry friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind,
Nor letter’d arrogance deny
The praise to merit unrefin’d.

When fainting nature called for aid,
And hov’ring death prepar’d the blow,
His vig’rous remedy display’d
The poewer of art without the show.

In misery’s darkest caverns known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
When hopeless anguish pour’d his groan,
And lonely want retir’d to die.

No summon mock’d by chill delay,
No petty gain disdain’d by pride,
The modest wants of ev’ry day,
The toil of ev’ry day supplied.

His virtues walk’d their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure th’ Eternal Master found
The single talent well employ’d.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by:
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Tho’ now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold graduations of decay
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And forc’d his soul the nearest way.

Congratulations, Russia!

You can't say civilization don't advance. ... for in every war they kill you another way.

[Will Rogers]

What a cardinal error

When art becomes estranged from worship, culture becomes degenerate (art).

Says Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, Germany.

Some people dare to critizise him.

Why not feel great pity for this poor man?

Born to be wilde, 70 years ago his "Aryan wisdom" would have generated (sic) thundering applause.

Slightly strange syllogisms

One week after his "letter to the Turkish military", today Mustafa Akyol got another remarkable article published in Turkish Daily News (TDN). Headline: The opium of the atheists.

"Did you also read it?" I asked my closest friend. "Ah, sorry, what are you busy with?"

"Yes. Syllogisms, dialectic, nothing special."

"And did you read ..."

"Unconcentrated or impolite, Sean? One word for your first question, even four for your second."

"Sorry, missed that. What do you think about the article?"

"Thought-out. Question-provoking. Listen: The king has two legs. Hens have two legs. Ergo the king is a hen. What's your opinion?"

"Wrong."

"Lovely, my sophisticated friend. Your opinion is, of course, not wrong."

"But you think Mr. Akyol's opinion is wrong? By the way, I am relieved you chose king as your subject, and not ..."

"Mr. Akyol's opinion is not wrong. He is absolutely right. I do just wonder, if he means what he did not say."

?

"Theists are believers.
Atheists are believers.
Ergo there is a god."

Wanted! Good answers to good questions

No, there does not exist any contract or gentleman's agreement between Mr. Bekdil and me.

No, I am not sure Mr. Bekdil is in possession of the best solutions to everything and all.

Yes, I do appreciate the questions he is asking.

Yes, I should like to read somebody's answers to these questions.

No, not Mr. Akyol's answers. (They would - with respect - be of no relevance.)

But what's about both Mr. Akyol's and (sic) Mr. Bekdil's president and prime minister?

Your turn, Mr. Gül! Your turn, Mr. Erdoğan!

Yes?

World's most semiotic nation!

Apropos unrivalled.

Mr. Bekdil lets indeed follow a question mark to one of his recent headlines.

By reading the article it is transmogrifying into an exclamation mark, though:

World's most semiotic nation!

Turkishness unrivalled

By "googling" Argentinianness, Chineseness, Germanness, Hungarianness etc., coming to Turkishness it becomes obvious:

Turkishness is unique!

Evidence: People trying to learn more about history, geography, literature, architecture, poetry, cuisine, music etc., on the first two pages would find nothing but

denigration of Turkishness (2)

insulting Turkishness (15)

belittling Turkishness

degrade Turkishness

Telling this my closest friend whose current topic of research - Pre-Assyrian Philately - is keeping him very busy, did not even look up when saying: "Inferiority complex."

"Tetrapilotomos", I whispered, "mind your tongue! Some people might feel insulted."

"That's it. Exactly those who feel insulted are meant. I can just repeat again and again that according to a Chinese saying those who feel insulted by others confess to their mental, their intellectual inferiority."

And off he went.