Arthur C. Clarke and Intergalactic Pop Art

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author died on March 18, 2008 at his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke wrote more than 100 books during his career spanning seventy years. Many people worldwide know him for his unforgettable and stunning masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey’, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke's diagnosis of an age marked by the rapid advances in technology that emnacipated the imagination of a whole generation fascinated many.
'2001: A Space Odyssey' is a pseudo history of the evolution of humankind drawing from Engels and concluding in Clarke's foresight. It starts with a depiction of the daily lives of apes, in far past times. An ape, among the many, at some point starts using its hand, operating with it. The movie does not show us a detailed process of making tools. Quite the contrary, it takes us to the very first moment when the ape was stricken by the thought to move its hand up and handle a bone. The moment is backgrounded with a score of Richard Strauss' magisterial piece 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. In all its implications, there is a leap to a new phase in human evolution/history. We hear Nietzsche, we watch Engels (see Engels' article 'The Part Played by Labour in the Evolution of Man). Clarke thought this new phase was coming to an end in his lifetime. The hopes for a moon landing triggered the imagination of a whole generation. These rapid advances in technology, so Clarke thought, meant a leap to a new phase: the Starchild. Starting with an ape tribe, the movie links to some thousands years far with a dissolve effect that links the bone and the space ship (in the shape of a bone, as well). The movie ends with another Strauss score (this time Johann Strauss, the son - "the next generation") 'The Blue Danube', showing an embryo in the space - "the starchild", the new phase.


Intergalactic voyages and moon landing
The context that triggered the imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, which later on triggered others’ imagination, is worth mentioning for a better understanding. The excitement about the 'Space Race' between the USSR and the USA was at its height in the 60s. People were excited about the advances in technology, new life style imposed by modernity, consuming boom, and increased popularity of images.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ appeared in 1968 in novel and film form. The talks of a possible trip to the moon, which was realised in 1969, changed the perception of the world for many, especially the Americans. It is not hard to find a pile of fiction, films, paintings, songs, and more produced in this era, which is marked by the fascination of the possibility to conquer the space. Celebrated Pop Artist Richard Hamilton placed the moon as the ceiling of the interior of a household in his famous collage called "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?” This was in 1956. In 1962, Hamilton paints “Towards a Definitive Statement on the Coming Trends in Men's Wear and Accessories (a) Together Let Us Explore the Stars” – a young fellow in astronaut garments - combined elements from advertising and media. The idea for the painting came from an article on male fashion in Playboy magazine. In 1968 Joe Tilson reproduces a TV capture image of Yuri Gagarin – a work of art he entitled “Transparency I: Yuri Gagarin 12 April 1961”. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ came the same year, nominated for four Oscars, winning only one for visual effects. The film/book gave an account of the moment that triggered the history of civilisation in the sense we understand it today: the moment when an ape starts using his hand – an important step in the history of human kind as Engels noted in a famous article. Convinced by the Engels argument, the audience are left convinced by the future foreseen in the movie: a baby in space – the history of humankind is to be written somewhere in space.
When Neil Armstrong travelled to the moon in 1969, he immediately became the most popular person all over the world. His picture was everywhere, reproduced on magazines, newspapers, and so on. Everyone was almost convinced that this was a huge step taken towards the sort of life depicted by Clarke and Kubrick in the film/novel. David Bowie sang Space Oddity the next year, in 1969, to coincide with the moon-landing. In the UK, it was used in conjunction with the BBC's coverage of the landing. The song was about the alienation feeling man encountered in his voyage in the space, staring the Earth from a long distance.

Clarke was right
The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s "He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970 - and he was right." In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years." Was he right? I think he was. He sounds even far too optimistic with the concluding phrase "few hundred years". The rapid advances in technology, and the growing cyberspace (money database, identity database, image database, and so much and so on) seems like swallowing the whole world that surrounds us and at the same time gives existence to us. Imagine the representations of your identity in the cyberspace: you have this amount of money in this bank, which means you get this credit card and you can do this, this, and that - you can buy more oil, drive more, travel more; you can buy the latest fashion and with this you can wear a new trendy identity; you can get a visa for the US, or Australia, or France, or whatever. If you do not have this amount of money, you can't get a credit card, you can't go abroad, you can't get a mobile phone, and etc. The cyberspace draws the borders of identities, we become embryos in the cyber-Space.

8 Books About Women’s World By Women

On the occassion of the International Women’s Day, I have chosen eight books that best reflect the nature of womanhood and that are penned by celebrated women writers who are concerned about the women issues worldwide.

A little note: International Women’s Day should not be understood as a day in the whole year to gift flowers to women; quite the opposite, 8 March should stand as a disturbing day, a reminder that prompts the situation of women anywhere in the world. This is the day when we should urge solutions for the unsolved problems concerning the women’s rights and conditions around the world, especially in the third world countries.
The writers mentioned here are the women, who have used their pen and courage to communicate what their sensitive souls noticed and what has passed and has been passing unnoticed by many.

1) Mrs.Dolloway by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf remains to be one of the most influential feminist writers in Western Literature. Her unconventional technique of stream of consciousness serves a good deal in entering the mind of her female protagonists. Mrs Dalloway details one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, who tries to arrange a party, goes out to buy flowers, encounter her old love, and go deep in her memories and thoughts. It is a marvellous account of the gulf between a woman’s inner world and her exposed self.

2) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The semi-autobiographical novel is an account of the protagonist's descent into mental illness paralleling Plath's own experiences with bipolar disorder, or clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first publication. The book mainly deals with the situation of women in the 1950s America, and the codes of social and moral conduct for women.

3) The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female African - American life during the 1930's in southern America, addressing the numerous issues in the black female life, including their exceedingly low position in black social culture. Because of the novel's sometimes-explicit content, particularly in terms of violence, it has been the frequent target of censors. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

4) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
This novel by the Nobel Prize winner authoress Doris Lessing is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. After the opening section, ironically called "Free Women", the book fragments into Anna's four notebooks, coloured black, red, yellow, and blue, respectively. The black is for Anna's memories of her life in Central Africa, the red for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own love affair; and the blue for recording her memories, dreams, and emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics.

5) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The novel is a postmodern and postcolonial response to Jane Eyre, famous British novel by Charlotte Bronte. It is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys' novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation from the perspective of women.

6) Other Side of the Mountain by Erendiz Atasü
This novel, which features the aspects of matrilineage, tells the story of three generation of women in the time of the foundation of Turkey and Turkish reforms. Parallel to its historical context, it narrates the modernisation process from the perspective of women, their adventure of integration to the new modernised Turkish society. That the story develops in three generations of women help the readers to see what sudden differences the period brought to the woman identity.

7) Memoirs of Halide Edib by Halide Edip Adivar
Halide Edib (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. In Memoirs, Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality. Halide Edip is best known as a Turkish novelist, political activist, and feminist. She lived through the period about which Erendiz Atasü was writing in her abovementioned novel. Halide Edip is maybe the most important and authentic woman in the Turkish modernisation and Turkey’s foundation. Yet, what makes Halide Edib a motif related to feminism should be evaluated within its historical context - nationalist struggle of independence, which required women to step out of their private space and go to the front, entitled them equality before the law, yet forced them back into their own private spaces at the dawn of the independence.

8) The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
An ardent feminist, Elif Shafak populates her novel with women characters of varied nature. This is a book in which women play the central role. An exuberant, dramatic novel that features vigorous, unforgettable female characters, the novel explores issues of gender and cultural identity as well as addressing contemporary political and religious topics in Turkey. When this novel was published in Turkey, Shafak was accused of insulting Turkish identity. The charges were later dropped, and now readers can discover for themselves this bold and powerful tale, one that confirms its author as a rising star of fiction.

Maestro morte.... Lamentiamo...

In memoriam maestro Luciano Pavarotti...

Nessun Dorma

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che fremono d'amore
e di speranza.

Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun sapra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!

Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che ti fa mia!

(Il nome suo nessun sapra!...
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)

Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!
All'alba vincero!
vincero, vincero!

***

Kimse uyumuyor bu gece, kimse uyumamalı
Sen de tatlı prenses
Soğuk odanda
Yıldızları izlemektesin
Aşkan ve umuttan titremekte ışıkları.

Benimse saklı içimde sırrım
Kimse bilmeyecek adımı
Hayır, hayır ! sadece senin dudaklarına fısıldayacağım onu
Gün ışığı içeri süzülürken !

Ve öpüşlerim bölecek
Seni benim kılan sessizliği !

(Kimse bilmeyecek adımı
Ve biz ölmek zorunda kalacağız !)

Git ey gece! Sönün yıldızlar! Sönün ! Şafakta kazanacağım ! Kazanacağım, kazanacağım !

İtalyanca'dan çeviri: Aslı Özgen

Ithaca

Ithaca’ya yelken açtığında,

Uzun olsun yolun,

Macera ve bilgi dolu.

Korkayım deme sakın

Ne Lestrygonianlar ne Kikloplar,

Ne de kızgın Poseidon’dan:

Çıkamazlar yoluna onlar, duramazlar karşında

Eğer rahat tutarsan içini,

Tatlı bir duygu okşamaktaysa, bedenini ve zihnini.

Lestrygonianlar, Kikloplar,

Veya acımasız Poseidon çıkmayacaktır yoluna,

Ruhunda yer yoksa onlar gibisine,

Eğer ruhun izin vermezse onlarla karşılaşmana.

Uzun tut yolunu sen.

Düşün, sıcak yaz sabahlarında

İçin heyecan ve mutlulukla kıpır kıpırken

Ilk defa gördüğün limanlara yanaşacaksın;

Fenike pazarlarında oyalanacak,

Güzel kumaşlar, ipekler satın alacaksın,

Büyük inciler, mercanlar, kehribar ve abanozlar serilecek önüne,

Aklını başından alan parfümler bulacaksın,

Ve hayal edebildiğinden de çok parfüm alacaksın;

Mısır kentlerinde dolaşacak,

Bilgelerle karşılaşacak, öğrenecek ve öğreneceksin.

Ama Ithaca hep aklında olacak.

Oraya ulaşmak hep en önemli amacın olacak.

Ama acele ediyim deme sakın.

Bırak, onlarca yıl sürsün bu yolculuk;

Yaşlandığında demir at adana,

Yolda kazandığın onca şeyle birlikte,

Ithaca’nın sana bir zenginlik sunmasını beklemeden.

Ithaca, sana güzel bir yolculuk verdi.

O olmasaydı, asla çıkamazdın yola.

Artık sana verecek birşeyi yok Ithaca’nın.

Şimdi eğer aciz görüyorsan onu, Ithaca sana ihanet ettiğinden değil.

Yolculuğun ve tecrübelerinin verdiği bilgelikle anlamalısın,

Anlamış olmalısın ‘Ithaca’lar ne demektir...

şiir: Kavafis
çeviri: Aslı Özgen

Geç kalmanın metafiziği: Ulus Baker için..

Gilles Deleuze, zamandan konuşmanın mümkün olmadığını söylediğinde, “şimdi”nin kaypaklığından çıkmıştı yola. “Şimdi”den konuşmak, “şimdi”yi kavramak imkansızdır, çünkü “şimdi” farkına vardığımız an, geçmişe gömülür.

Ulus Baker, 12 Temmuz günü geçmişe gömüldü. Benim için küllerinden doğdu. Mecaz yapmıyorum. Onu hayatıma sokan ne yazık ki ölüm haberi oldu. Köşe bucak izini sürerken, yüzümü gizlemek, görünmez olmak istedim. Onun varlığından haberdar olamayışımın, onu tanıyamadan ellerimden kayıp gidişinin utancı vardı gözlerimde. Oysa Baker, hep olur ya, sadece bir nefes uzakmış benden... Elimi uzatsam oradaymış; ama her neyse körebenin kolları o yönü yoklamamış. Az yaklaşmış, eli Deleuze’e çarpmış, Spinoza’dan beride Ulus’a dokunamamış...

Kıbrıs’ta bulunduğum son 11 ay boyunca, ilk defa bu atmosferin anlamlı bir esintisi olduğunu bana hissettirdi Ulus. Onun annesi, Kıbrıslı Türk kadın şair Pembe Marmara; babası ise adanın en tanışmış psikiyatrlarından Sedat Baker’di. Kıbrıs’ta, orada, burada, şurada, farklı köşelerde Ulus’un parmak izleri var gibiydi. Düşünceli ve sorgulayan gözlerinden çıkan bir ateş, sigarasından bir nefes salınıyor olmalı Afrodit’in adasında.

Tanıl Bora, Ulus’un “Kendi fizikî varlığını hesaba katmayan, bahse konu etmeyen, sâfî Intellect gibi” olduğunu söylerken bunun “Kendisinin, fizikî varlığının sorumluluğunu almamasının görünüşü” olduğunu vurgular. Necmi Erdoğan da benzer bir duyguyu ifade ederken, Ulus’un “kendi bedenini Deleuze'ün deyişiyle ‘organsız beden’ gibi başsız sonsuz bir akış, serbest bir yoğunluk, göçebe bir tekillik, taşlaşmamış bir üretkenlik şeklinde” kurmuş olmasından bahseder. “Tıpkı Deleuze'ün ‘organsız beden’i gibi ‘sınırlanmasına’, akışının ‘kesilmesine’, müdahale edilmesine karşı durduğu için sağlıkla ilgili baskılara direndi”ğini düşünür Necmi Erdoğan.

Descartes’ın kartezyen ikilik ile ortaya attığı günden bu yana düşünce sistemimizi biçimlendiren ruh-beden ikiliğine karşı duran sayılı postmodern figürlerden biri olarak çıkıyor karşımıza Ulus. Her zaman “sağlıklı” olmanın “normal”, “bedenine iyi bakmayı reddetmenin” de “tuhaf” karşılandığı bu gelenek, bugün “beden” kavramının yarattığı tüm çağrışımlar açısından sorgulanmakta.

Ulus, felsefeyi yaşıyor, onu içselleştiriyordu... Bir yazısında dediği gibi felsefeyi, onu sadece kendi alanında uygulamaktan uzak gören ve Burjuva ikiyüzlülüğüne denk düşen “Batı pragmatizmi” çerçevesinde algılamıyor; yaşıyordu. Felsefelerini hayatlarının bir ölçüsü ve ritmi haline getirmeyi başaran Spinoza ve Nietzsche gibi, Ulus da Deleuze'ün bu felsefecileri tanımlamak için kullandığı, "kamusal" değil "özel" filozoflar kapsamına girebilir miydi?

1960 yılında Leningrad’ta dünyaya gelen Ulus, Dostoyeski’nin gri kentinde doğmuş olmayı da benzer biçimde içselleştirmişti. Şöyle diyordu bir yazısında: “diyelim ki bu Rus insanını biraz da kaderini paylaşarak daha iyi tanıma şansım oldu”. Bu toprakların halkı, tarihi, felsefecileri ve üstatları hakkında imrenilecek bilgiye ve fikre sahip Ulus’un Dostoyevski ve Tarkovski üzerine makalesi, Rus sanatının bu iki duayenini nasıl özümsediğinin basit bir resmi olarak çıkıyor karşımıza.

Bu yazısında cevabı hazır olan sorulara değinyor Ulus, Dostoyevski’den hep alıntılanan o “Tanrı yoksa her şey mubahtır” sözünden hareketle. Öteki türlü söylemeyi deneyelim: Her şeyin mubah olduğu bir toplumda, Tanrı ölmüş olmalıdır. Yani cevap sorudan önce vardır ve Dostoyevski bunu bu şekilde ifade etmiştir. Ulus, Godard’tan örnek verir netleştirmek için: "demek ki ölmemişim, çünkü bütün hayatım bir film şeridi gibi gözlerimin önünden geçmedi." Ulus, bu tür Cogito’lara “kapalı soru” der.

Ulus’un yaşamı, bedeni ve zihni, tüm göstergeleriyle, postmodernizmin o sorgulayan tavrının bir göstereni gibiydi. Ersan Ocak, yazısında “onun yaptığının bir düşünce-duygu dokumacılığı olduğunu” düşündüğünden bahseder; “Aynı meseleyi her yeniden ele alışında farklı desenler dokuyan yaratıcı bir usta”... Deleuze ve Guattari’nin “rizom”u gibi; ilişkiler yumağı halinde, birbirini dürten, kavuşup kavuşup çözülen ve oradan bambaşka bir ontolojiye filiz veren bir bütünsellik ve etkileşim yumağı.

Bir tür “açık soru” Ulus’un deyimiyle, cevabı önceden hazır olmayan cinsten... Bizi hayrete düşürmeyi hedefleyen, cevaplanmayı değil hissedilmeyi bekleyen bir soru cümlesi gibi Ulus’un yaşamı. Deleuze'ün tanımıyla "şeylerin ortasından", birdenbire türeyen, neredeyse amaçsız; ama sormayan, söyleyen ve anlatan sorular.