Sunday, January 14, 2007
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THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY,
AND THE ARMENIAN
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When it comes to races, nations, and tribes, there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only good and bad human beings, and more often than not, the bad are misguided dupes.
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To be human means to be prone to error, especially when one is sure to be right. “I may be right” is closer to “I may be wrong” than to “I am right!”
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It takes a lot of hatred to love one’s country – hatred of past and present enemies, hatred of those who are or have been on their side, hatred of fellow countrymen who do not share one’s love to the same degree, and hatred of those who believe in the brotherhood of all men, which also means hatred of tolerance.
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To be a good patriot also means to feel guilty by association whenever a fellow countryman is arrested and makes headlines. But guilt by association is a racist concept. Hitler was a racist. Buddha and Christ were not. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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To fall in love means to kill the rest of mankind, said Camus. If you say that’s going too far, let’s say, passionate love makes us indifferent to the fate of others. But indifference is worse than hatred. In hatred we are connected to those we hate. In indifference this connection is severed.
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Our enemies “fail to see us as what we really are – a bunch of traumatized half-hysterical refugees and survivors haunted by dreadful nightmares…” I am now quoting from HOW TO CURE A FANATIC (New York, 2006) by Amos Oz. I should like to see one of our Turcocentric pundits produce such a sentence.
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Monday, January 15, 2007
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ON BELIEF SYSTEMS
AND RELATED ATROCITIES
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It is in life as it is in lottery: for every winner there will be several million losers. An optimist hopes to win; a realist is aware of the odds and does not believe in miracles; and a pessimist knows it’s a racket.
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I believe in miracles. I believe the universe to be the greatest miracle of all beside which changing water to wine is no better than an abracadabra trick.
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Speaking of miracles and abracadabra: I don’t believe which is better or worse: believing in a past messiah or in a future one. As for prophets and belief systems: I see nothing wrong with any of them provided their followers don’t kill one another or themselves.
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I believe any belief system that legitimizes murder and suicide to be an instrument of the devil.
Not all Turks are born killers or denialists. There is no doubt about that anymore. Likewise, not all Armenians bear a racist grudge against all Turks. With one difference. No Armenian of Pamuk’s or Akjam’s stature has produced a work to point out that fact. If he did, he would be ostracized and silenced as a traitor to the Cause. In that sense, Turks are ahead of us.
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To kill and die for one’s country fighting an enemy who also kills and dies for his own: does that make any sense to you? I am against capital punishment but I would make an exception of all those guilty of legitimizing and promoting the idea of killing and dying for one’s country.
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Of the many forms of illusion – I am smarter than you, I understand more than you do, my dick is bigger than yours – surely the most widely entertained and dangerous must be “My god is better than yours.”
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Tuesday, January 16, 2007
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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To contradict is not the same as to disagree. Some people contradict automatically, unthinkingly, instinctively – that’s their way of asserting superior wisdom. To pretend to be wiser than one is: I would call that the most universal of all temptations.
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When we think of experiencing life, we may delude ourselves into thinking that a man who has climbed Everest, or amassed a vast fortune, or slept with two thousand women has experienced life. But what if in the process of doing these things he has succeeded only in diminishing his capacity to feel, to understand, to love, and ultimately, to experience.
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I once heard someone reading to an audience from one of my books. My first reaction was to beg him to stop. I have a horror of boring people. I would have given up writing years ago were it not for the fact that even people who hate me, read me – judging by the number of abusive e-mails I get.
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Elfriede Jelinek in THE PIANO TEACHER: “The opposite sex always wants the exact opposite.”
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Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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THE ART OF LIVING
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Wisdom or the art of living consists in minimizing the guesswork and replacing total ignorance with partial knowledge.
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We may learn to limit the number of our blunders but we have no control over the blunders of others. Which may explain the tragic fate of some of the wisest men that ever lived, from Socrates to Gandhi.
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And speaking of Christ: if there is a moral in the story of Christianity it is that, not even god can survive human blunders. As for the wisdom of American presidents: in his SHADOW PEOPLE: INSIDE HISTORY’S MOST NOTORIOUS SECRET SOCIETIES, John Lawrence Reynolds writes that the feud between Shiites and Sunnis began in the 7th Century, which means it has lasted for 1,400 years. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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The universe is the greatest miracle of all – no doubt about that. I may have mentioned that already. What I may have failed to mention is that the second greatest miracle from where I stand is the fact that I have survived, and I have survived not only World War II, the Greek Civil War that followed, and a number of other natural and man-made disasters, but my own blunders.
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It has been said that the only reality we can come to grips with is the future. There isn’t much we can do about the past. The present is only a fleeting moment that even as we experience it has become the past. It follows, our struggle is with something that is prey to countless factors most of which remain beyond our perception and control.
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