Rest in Peace Sweet Child

To me, you came to the scene as a sweet curly kid and have past away the same.
Not a king whose life is too complicated and costumes are too cocky and mysterious.
Just come pure, sung pure and gone pure.
Goodbye sweet child...
The world has been loving you and now, just crying for you.
Goodbye.

The Watchtower

When the electricity along your nerves reaches a certain point that you cannot bear any more, you need something to neutralize it, my friends.

Touching the soil may work, jumping the water may work, jumping into the bottle may work and finally, Hendrix definitely works.

Yes he does.

His genius on interpreting the vibrations of the universe is very clear so that any person who has a degree can easily see. I like the performers who are showing everything they got during the action. Loosing the control and letting the energy free.

Now...

A very mysterious song, originally created by "great" Bob Dylan after a serious motorbike accident was transformed into another thing, that even the creator appreciated the transformer.

Who did it?

Jimi Hendrix, in a couple of days.

The name of the song was "all along the watchtower".

Maybe the definition of the art is "the performance of decomposition of the nature and then re-composing it in your own way". Then, every one respects the thing you come up with.

Here is the lyrics. Don't forget to listen to the song while you're reading it :)

there must be some kind of way out of here,
said the joker to the thief,
there's too much confusion,
i can't get no relief.
businessmen, they
drink my wine,
plowmen
dig my earth,
none of them along the line
know what any of it is worth.

Hey!

no reason to get excited,
the thief, he kindly spoke,
there are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke.
but you and i, we've been through that,
and this is not our fate,
so let us not talk
falsely now,
the hour is getting late.

[supreme solo]

all along the watchtower,
princes kept the view
while all the women came and went,
barefoot servants, too.

outside in the cold distance
a wildcat did growl,
two riders were approaching,
and the wind began to howl.

Hey!
All along the watchtower...
[fading]

The Metaphor

Almost the best metaphor I have ever read is the one in the book Mahrem by Elif Şafak. This book has been translated into English by Brendan Freely and the English name of the book is "The Gaze". I'd like to share the words by quoting. But... I am not sure if I could translate the sentences into English well. First, I am giving the original Turkish ones:

"Yokuşun ikinci kısmının son adımında dönüp de geriye bakanlar, denizi görebilirdi. Mavi, masmaviydi deniz; rehindi duru durgunluğunda. Bazı kadınlar, bazı bazı, delice bir fikre kapılırdı. Deniz, birikmiş sütünü akıtacak ağız arayan bir meme ucu gibi pütür pütür kabarır, sızım sızım sızlar, usul usul çağırırdı uzaktan. Şimdi... ne geçmişe kederlenmek, ne geleceğe didinmek; sanki... sadece ve sadece gözler-kapalı-ağız-açık kendini salarak, şu anı kana kana emmekle mümkün olabilecekti zamana doyabilmek." Page 35-36

The sea and the nipple/areola metaphor... This lady rules the language. And my translation for the paragraph above:

"On the last step of the hill's second part, the ones who stop a while and look back could see the sea. The sea was blue, deep blue; pledged by its pure quiescent. Some women, sometimes, cherish an illusion. The sea uprises so rough, like a saturated nipple seeking for an opening to pour its milk, aches so deeply, calls so quietly. Now... not to deplore for the past, not to fag for the future; as if... it would be possible to get enough of time merely by releasing yourself and sucking the current moment deeply with eyes-shut-open-mouthed."

I hope I could have carried the original taste of Elif Şafak's style to English. Read "The Gaze" for the official literary pleasure ;)

I Wanna Stay, OK?

I just am going to share a very strong poem by Bukowski. But before that...
You know what? I don't wanna die, OK?
Yeah! Most of the times, life seems too odd and maybe most of us feel despair about it.
However!
I wanna stay here for a long long time with my daughter and wife and everything that makes me feel in comfort. I wanna watch the sundown above the sea while I am drinking my cold big size beer and having some peanuts in warm feelings. When I look left, I'd like to see my love and when I look right, I wanna see my life. That's it!
Death is a silly process. I invite all the medical doctors and biologists to find a way to heal the end-of-life disorder.
I am here!
Deal?

And the poem by the great American poet:

born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this
walking and living through this
dying because of this
muted because of this
castrated
debauched
disinherited
because of this
fooled by this
used by this
pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this
made violent
made inhuman
by this
the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat
the gun
the knife
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
the fingers reach for the bottle
the pill
the powder

we are born into this sorrowful deadliness
we are born into a government 60 years in debt
that soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
and the banks will burn
money will be useless
there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
it will be guns and roving mobs
land will be useless
food will become a diminishing return
nuclear power will be taken over by the many
explosions will continually shake the earth
radiated robot men will stalk each other
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
trees will die
all vegetation will die
radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold
the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
the petering out of supplies
the natural effect of general decay
and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
born out of that
the sun still hidden there
awaiting the next chapter

-Charles Bukowski, from The Last Night of the Earth Poems, 1992

Transformation Needed

Bruce Lee was one of the great persons whom I admire. The feeling in me, while I am travelling in the veins of the varying sizes of the life itself, is that I am being stuck and cannot flow forward any more for some reason. I can sense that something must be changing dramatically in time. A kind of revolution, maybe... That will be the one that looses the veins again and lets the blood free and releases the life. Yes my friends. I want this revolution. I need this.
Look around... The old fashioned everything is about to stop. The education cannot make the mass intellectuals, the industry is killing the natural environment, the medical science of centuries is not able to beat tiny miny viral life forms, the economy, hence the mathematics, of this form is becoming useless, so called information is some signal on the cable, chaos is everywhere... Formal patterns are dead. Classics are not sufficient.
And suddenly when we look back to early 1970s a man was saying "Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend"
I know, we need a great revolution after which we can calculate the fuzzy parameters, solve the chaotic equations and the new form of everything will be "unknown" and unique motto of every philosophical school will be written to the books "be water my friend".
Lee was knowing this. Turing and Gödel were knowing this.
Respect.

The System We are in

Inter-related units which are working for a common purpose is called "a system" as defined in most of the books. According to this definition we need to point out the common purposes of our "very well designed" social system. I am looking around and cannot write down 3 common things for the society I am in.
Nowadays, I am reading a book: Liberty and the State, by Charles Kershaw Rowley. To be honest, it is not an introductory text for non-sociologists like me, but I am trying to understand the articles collected in the book by using my mathematics background. In this book, I am actually in the middle of it-not finished yet-and my reading speeed is about 5 pages/hour, it is very surprising for me to see the reality that as a free person it is not that easy to carry on your freedom in a society. I can hear the voices "Hey stupid! You don't need to be a sociologist for knowing that!" :) However, all I am trying to do is to understand the system, that affects "my being" most powerfully, in a scientific context. It is easy to utter the words of wisdom about life and society by using merely our personal experiences, in our daily life. But it is nothing! The only way to learn things and persuade the others is to listen and speak the language of the science in which the rules are very clear and simple.
In contrast, we are not actually reading that boring (!) stuff written by the snobs and following the myths and shaping our lives by the rules that look fuzzy, at least, for most of the intelligent ones it is easy to conceive the logical blanks, those become big question marks in time.
On the other hand, for an educated person it is not that easy to search all the scientific literature and learn all about social systems and design her/his life according to the things that learnt. There's no time! Life is short. So what will we do? Easiest answer might be the word "education". Use the education as a system for teaching the cumulative common information about life. And a subsequent question comes: "Who designs the educational system?". Yeah! A problem of trust to the authority that shapes our lives and we go back to the beginnig: How can I learn all the objective and true acquirements about social systems in a timely and practial way to dignify my life? Maybe a "supernatural" could summarize everything for us in a book. Maybe...
Or maybe a new technology would change the way we learn or the form of the information around and it becomes feasible to access and understand any information, any time. Maybe...
Maybe I should not insist on being so "definite free" in my life and let the life pass as it knows...
Or I could transform my understanding of freedom into a less free form...
Okay, okay. This is my first post and I might be going too far for a blog entry... I promise you that I will post more enjoyable things in time ;)