Uprooting memories

As I am walking to the bus stop at Lexington and 57, I am trying to understand why I am feeling lonely. I am still working at the same place and I still have great friends around me.

The only difference in my life was moving to a new place in New Jersey. I thought it would make no difference moving from one apartment complex to another - you don't know your neighbors anyway . What I did not take into account was the change in my commute route.

For four years I took the Roosevelt Island Tram to work. RI is a small community - and in the packed tram you see the same faces over and over again. There is the sharp dressed woman - I can't call her ugly but she is not beautiful either and she always dresses sharp. She likes red shoes and she seems to draw much required self-esteem from those shoes. There is the loud fat guy in the wheel chair. He likes to talk with the operator. He does not talk really, he shouts so that everyone in the tram listen to their dialogue. I think he is very lonely. There is the Japanese guy who skates to the tram - and sometimes he has his morning smoke on the way. I tend to avoid him because I hate the bitter after-smoke smell. There is the short guy -tall girl couple. It is cruel and base but I enjoy watching them struggle as they kiss goodbye. There is another couple or rather an ex-couple. Now they avoid each other -another rub for my amygdala. I have my own persona non grata as well. Every time I notice her silhouette I carefully position myself towards one of the corners so that I can pretend that I did not notice her.

I know them - my brain is filled with countless details about them. Like a sponge,it absorbs all these little things, their relationships, their habits, their voices. As I am walking to the bus stop at Lexington and 57, it struggles- looking for their familiar faces. They are still alive for me, living in my brain. Those memories, however,will fade, those connections will become dysfunctional. Forgetting someone is not very different than losing someone.

It fills me with sadness. I feel like I have uprooted a plant. It is still alive, grasping struggling for life. I can choose to replant it and it will continue doing what is was doing until now, or it will wither to death. In my whole life, like a farmer plowing his land, I chose the latter -- without thinking, over and over and over again. I take it as a part of life. At the same time I can not help but think - how many brains are there in the Roosevelt Island Tram where my caricatured imprints are dying a slow death?

Chapter 1: Ghost of an old friend

The avenue was a deep, infinite crevice among the black skyscrapers. Sun betrayed its existence as a green reflection on the solar panels. As his wheelchair glided down the empty avenue, Tchokov likened them to the archaic computers, green glyphs on a black screen --even older than himself.

With trembling hands he lit a synthar. He exhaled and watched smoke and vapor separate as the latter condensed quickly. Despite his thick coat and heated chair he was feeling the cold in his bones. He let out an unintelligible curse.

“I remember the time when they built the first one. It was on 14^th and 3^rd .” he croaked - slowly emphasizing every word. Dry air was burning his throat. “ An intimidating slab of granite, not this new verre-verte. A building without doors, without sound, without stench. Sterile,silent, sentient. It worked beyond expectations.”

"I guess glass is less intimidating than granite." said his companion absently. Tchokov kept his gaze on the avenue. “Don't get me wrong” he said “ the battle was already lost. Did you remember the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan?”. “I just /grebbed/ it” “There is a scene where one soldier puts another one to the knife after a fierce struggle. He shushes him like a child as the knife goes in. The first 'craper was not the knife, it was the shush.”

“It was all Dall'a nonsense and you are dramatizing ” said Mehcq “Where you see death I see ascension. And the streets are probably empty just because it is freezing out there. ” Tchokov did not reply. “You know what” said Mehcq changing the subject with a voice part mischief part arrogance “ I have not felt cold for ages”. Tchokov, already not feeling his feet smiled bitterly and shouted “Fuck you!” at the same time. Mehcq went on unabashed “No, but seriously, I feel hunger with its very human urgency when my energy goes low. Occasionally, I feel the anger that is associated with it. But I do not feel cold..I can't even remember how feeling cold was. It must have been lost somewhere in translation.”

Tchokov did not reply - trying to think what it was like to be Mehcq was overwhelming. He had to remind himself constantly that "it" was not his old friend talking to him - it was a ghost serving an alien master. "Look, I feel stupid, but you have to explain me that plan of yours again. Since I woke up, I feel I am spinning in a constant whirlwind and nothing makes sense."

"I understand" said Mehcq. "Maybe this can help you to orient.". Screen of the wheelchair lit up. "What is that?" asked Tchokov. "Oh - you'll like it" said Mehcq " You wrote this just before you died."

TO BE CONTINUED

Zen of Backgammon

I don't exactly remember when I learned playing backgammon. My mother says, she and I started to play against dad when I was four. But I do remember that I used to cry when we lost, sometimes blaming mom for mistakes. More often my anger was targeted towards the dice. It was evil. It always worked against my plans. "It is not fair" I would have said "all we needed to win was anything above 2 and I rolled a 2-1".

Backgammon was the first abstract game I have learned -- and what an excitement it was. Until that point, games were typically based on physical activities - you needed to catch someone, hide from someone or grab something - not very different from what kittens play. Perhaps our most "human" games involved roleplaying: we would be soldiers or cowboys. Backgammon was different. It was not connected to anything in the real world. Why would moving your tokens to the last quadrant would let you take them into your hand and win the game? Total nonsense. Backgammon was fascinatingly absurd.

In a very short period of time I was hooked. I was waiting everyday for my dad to come home so that I can have my daily dose of backgammon -- a 5 round match. Initially I was focusing on my tokens alone, trying to get them to the last quadrant. As I started to play without mom and grasped the basic strategies, I realized that dad was laying traps for me or planning his moves to make my life more difficult. I remember the resentment I felt towards him and my desire to thwart his evil plans. After a while, like Anakin Skywalker embracing the dark side, I also became an evil player. I was laying traps to capture his pieces or would be filled with righteous revenge when dice rolled particularly badly for him.

Everytime my game got better, dad adjusted the challenge by dropping some of his self-imposed handicaps and eventually started playing normally. I was still losing most of the games but I knew that he was doing his best and the game was fair. I started to put myself into my his boots and think what I would play if I was in his position. Once again, the game changed - now it was an analysis of situations and decisions. I was not complaining about luck anymore, I was complaining about lame games when there was not enough decisions to make. I started offering dad some adjustments to his strategies, and when he refused to acknowledge my revolutionary methods I attempted to create positions in the game to demonstrate my point. I often failed and ditched most of these strategies, but few of them succeded and became a permanent part of my game.

What I did not know was there was yet another stage. A stage when situational decisions become reflexive and instead you start worrying about the flow of the game, when given similarly feasible strategies you always go for the more aesthetic option and expect from your opponent to do the same. A good game was no longer about wining or losing, or about being right about the best strategy. It was about exchanging complex challenges with your opponent. It was something beautiful in itself, and as satisfying as reading a poem you love. After thousands of games I realized, once again, that my dad was playing a different game than I was playing. All the years he was subtly, patiently tutoring me, never explicitly mentioning these. One can not learn such things --one needs to discover them.

Whenever I go back to Turkey to visit my parents, we sit together with dad and play backgammon, a 5 round match every night. I don't know what he feels during our games; we don't talk about it. But for me it is a ritual where I remember that life is not about winning or being right and it is lame only if you live it lamely.

Why religion matters ( to atheists)

Since I first heard about the scientology I secretly suspected that it was a big social joke. I hoped Tom Cruise at one point would hold a press conference explaining they did this to show how easily ordinary people can believe in absurd non-sense and explain all other religions probably started in a similar manner. It took me a decade to convince myself that these people are not joking. They are either irrationally obsessed with power or they are -well-just irrational.

But, how can you elevate a bad science fiction novel into a holy book? Well content wise its not that difficult. Other holy books does not exactly pass the rationality test either. But they come with millennium-full of rationalization, a tweak here, and an interpretation there. It is a process of immunization against trivial forms of inquiry and alignment with the society's values. I thought it was a long and difficult thing to do and that's why a "new" religion was very unlikely to appear.

Although religions require long periods to have a hold in the society, it is not the case on the level of individual. When a person decides to believe in a religion they just flip the faith switch- it is in our hardware. When faced with religious claims from one's own religion, people do not apply the same mental facilities they normally would apply for example to the claims of a car-dealer. It is a stochastic process that makes both failure and creation of new religions more likely, more dynamic and faster.

This ties back to a common illusion among atheists - that religion is just an infection. Among fellow atheists you can hear someone saying "If only we could wipe out these damned memes..." and hallelujah we will bring the kingdom of reason. Well - not quite - If religion indeed has a biological basis, as proposed by many recent psychological experiments, then it will spring up again in different, raw and dangerous forms.

But if it is biological why we atheists never think, mention or discuss what we would do if - despite our most militaristic parenting- our children embrace religion one day? How do you handle a scientologist child? Evangelicals refusing the fact that their children can be homosexual live in a state of denial. They believe this happens because of bad parenting and it will never happen in their family. They refuse that there is something intrinsic, something human, something that was set in the stone in their children that compels them to act the way that they act and there is nothing they can do about it other than making their lives miserable by forcing them to act differently. How is an atheist who ignores that their children may turn into religion is different? Are not they in the same state of denial ? Are not they making the world a colder, more difficult place by taking a hard anti-religion stance ?

Religion matters for atheists because it is not just those damned memes - it is the human nature, that switch we flip, that shepherd we follow. Some of us are more resistant to this nature - some of us are not. We need to figure out how to bend the tree without snapping it. It is a lot better to have a child that believes in a tolerant non-literalist pluralistic form of christianity than a scientologist. By dismissing all religions as a disease we are condemning those who believe to a position where they must defend their faith with ferocity, bigotry and fallacy - we are condemning them to fundamentalism.

This is not to say that we should all shut up - on the contrary - atheists must criticize the worst forms of fundamentalism and fight for the next generation's right of access to unbiased scientific education. Yet we should also support the more tolerant, pluralistic forms of religion, encourage religious to align their religion with the changing moral values of the society and welcome them as allies against absolutism and fundamentalism. All of us should act as if we have religious children that we love and care for- because it may as well happen.

Turks are Orcs

This guy had it coming. He criticized Lord of the Rings as being racist. What followed was 188 people telling and shouting him that he is an idiot. It seems like criticizing LOTR is an easy way of getting traffic -and these days you can't get enough of it- so I will give it a shot.

Here is my pet theory: Orcs are Turks - or Mongols for that matter. "Evil" in LOTR is oriental. Before you post a comment on how idiotic this claim is -I am hoping to beat the frenchman- please give me a second to explain why.

Disclaimers first - Etymology of the word "orc" has nothing to do with Turks. The word is from old English meaning demon, which in turn was borrowed from Latin "Orcus"- the god of the Underworld. However Tolkien's Orcs and Beowulf's Orcs are very different. Tolkien just used the word but loaded it with a new meaning.

Second, I do not think that Orcs are Blacks. This comes up often- especially in United States- but I believe what is happening is people are feeling the white racism and immediately identify the victims as blacks. It does not help that sometimes orcs are defined as dark skinned either. Fortunately for my case, the similarity stops there. We have, on the other hand, a long list of supporting evidence for the case of Orcs are Turks - and Turks can be quite dark skinned.

Finally, I am not here to blame Tolkien with racism or start a flame war. It is possible to find certain level of interracial mistrust in any human - it is in our biology. LOTR is a great book and in LOTR there are many passages where the racial mistrust itself is attacked. However as much as Turks were the "others" for Europe, the Orcs were the others for Dunedain - a race with no hope of reconciliation.

Now let's move to the more interesting part - why orcs must be turks.

The first cues are geographical. Dunedain means "men of the west" literally. And a figure of Europe is unmistakable in LOTR. Orcs are on the east, south east more precisely -and they are not "European".

Dunedain and Elves are fair skinned, graceful. Orcs are short and robust and bow legged. They are a "horde" and wolf-riders.

Orcs use scimitars and spears. Quoting from wikipedia entry for scimitar: "The name can be used to refer to almost any Middle Eastern or South Asian sword with a curved blade. They include Arabic saif, Indian talwar, Persian shamshir, and Turkish kilij and yatağan, among others. These blades all were developed from the ubiquitous parent sword, the Turko-Mongol saber."

It is not clear what Orcs used as bows in Tolkien - I did quite a bit of research and could not find it. There is one passage where orcs carry yew self bows, but what is described in other parts are very different and sounds suspiciously like short composite bows. Apparently Peter Jackson also thinks like me, so the Orcs in the LOTR movies use composite short bows. The very bows that made Turks and Mongols the dominant horse archers for almost a millenium. The bows of the dunedain and elves, on the other hand, are English longbows and selfbows.

Orcs are strong and war-like. They are organized in a one-man structure as opposed to feudal, many kingdom structure of the elves, dwarves and hobbits. They are heretics, followers of Morgoth ( which I believe to be Muhammed- this would make perfect sense for the Catholic Tolkien). Their leaders are called Sauron and Saruman - suspicously sounding similar to Ottoman Sultan Suleyman. My favourite is the "evil eye in the southeast" - are you kidding me?

The idea of the Dunedain - once powerful and united, now divided into nation-states- is very similar to Roman Empire- which again is very convenient for Roman-Catholic Tolkien.

Battle of the Pelennor Fields and Battle of Vienna - which signalled the point where the Ottoman expansion into Europe was stopped- are very similar. The holy league relief forces - mainly cavalry strikes the sieging army from the flanks - a decisive blow. They are so similar that it is impossible to dissmis it as similarity. I strongly believe Tolkien was inspired by the Battle of Vienna.

There are many different fine points - but I believe you got my point. You can now go back and read LOTR once again, this time with my glasses or post a comment on how stupid I am. The choice is yours.

Quotable Dr. De Mir

If you alternate reading murakami and gaiman, some really funny things happen to your mind. Here is a brain dump:

A hole defines a donut. A baker can possibly come up with something else, without a hole, and tastes exactly like a donut. But since by common (non)sense donuts have a hole, bakers will put a hole in it. The hole has nothing to do with the taste, texture and chemical structure of the thing. And once you eat the donut, it will not make a difference anyway.

These days I feel that the meaning of life is exactly like a hole in a donut. Metaphysically we can not agree on whether it exists on not. But as donuts have a hole, our lives have a meaning. That is we can not even start talking about our lives without referencing to a meaning. Even Kirilov in Demons is driven by a very complicated goal function. And similar to donut it really does not matter once it ends. Whether the life's meaning exists is a different question from whether one's life has a meaning. And (eureka!) we are done. The meaning of life and the hole in a donut are very similar things. Aren't they Peter Parker?

The shame is ours, so is the burden

(This is a repost. I felt the need to reiterate my position on the issue because several Armenian groups uses the same old language of hatred to present Turks as monsters. I hope this helps to convince you otherwise.)

I would like to express my deepest sorrow for the loss of Hrant Dink. Hrant Dink was many things, a child of Anatolia, a champion of peace and reconciliation, an intellectual with a passion for defending the freedom of thought. But first, he was a bridge between the two nations. A bridge that is tiny and fragile, yet one of the precious few we have.

It is tragic that we need a murder to reflect on our responsibilities. Still, we need to stop and ask ourselves : “What could I have done? What should I do now?”. Not that we can bring Hrant Dink back by doing so, but we can fulfill his vision by establishing new and stronger bridges. We can follow his example to close this horrible gap that is keeping the children of Anatolia apart. We can learn once again to cherish the culture, the history and the life we share.

We now have a rather clear view of what happened. Turkish courts are delivering justice to those who are responsible for this murder. However there awaits another task, much bigger in its scope and more elaborate in its nature. It is to assign responsibility to those who indirectly supported this murder by either creating an environment of hatred or by not paying due diligence to neutralize such efforts.

We all carry this burden because we did not react appropriately in the past, out of fear, out of ignorance, out of selfishness, to suppress the growth of ultra-nationalism in Turkey. Turkish law enforcement carries this burden as they surely were aware of Hayal’s activities and did not interfere with his program of brainwashing and assassin training. Ultra nationalist parties carry this burden as they seek gaining power from inducing hatred against Armenians. Turkish government carries this burden as they still present a heavily skewed version of the events in 1915 in the public schools, playing into the hands of monsters like Hayal. Armenian diaspora carries this burden, as they too seek to gain power by increasing the dichotomy.

This is not a childish, cruel and ignorant act of a 17 year old. This is the price we pay for not interfering with those who seek to gain power from hatred. This is the price we pay for not asking, questioning and amending. In this country many more pigeons will be killed unless we do something. The loss, the pain and the shame are ours, so is the burden to fix it.

(Thanks to FX for the comments)