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16 Ocak 2007

Letters from Vietnam 59

16 January 2007

For my dear friend, I.Y.

I too, breaking out of old ways, had discovered solitude and the melancholy which is at the basis of religion. Religion turns that melancholy into uplifting fear and hope. But I had rejected the ways and comforts of religion; I couldn’t turn to them again, just like that. That melancholy about the world remained something I had to put up with my own. At some times it was sharp; at some times it wasn’t there.

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, p.125

I have received a strange letter from a friend two days ago. I hope that this blog entry will find my dear friend.

I.Y. is one of my long-time friends since the beginning of university years. We have spent almost five years together in the school. While he left the community for a partial freedom with a few friends in the university, I was still a faithful devotee. Then I graduated ad moved to Thailand. He stayed in the school one more year. After he finished the university, he did his master’s degree in Istanbul. Then he went to Florida for PhD with his wife. In the last seven years I have been away from Turkey, we met twice in Istanbul. As old friends meet and talk, we did the same thing. He came to my brother’s house to visit in 2003. As I remembered it was a cheerful and happy chat. We have sent a few e-mails to each other in these seven years period. Mostly on important days like bayrams or new years…

I called his letter strange because of its content. His style is always the same. His words remind me voice of a desperate man who believes in paradoxes of life and his disbelief in solution is reflected indefinitely on the surfaces of mirrors of his words… His style, as a man of letters, did not change in the last seven years. In his letters, there is always sound of a man who looks for the truth and at the end blames the roads or guides for the failures. Some nostalgia –which I always like to read- and some pieces from the old days’ happy moments fill the beginnings of most of his letters. He always reminds me Kafka for his belief in inconsistencies. The difference between Kafka and him is clear. Kafka has been tortured by external forces and he uses these tortures to create his art. However I.Y. tortures himself with the belief in unhappiness. He seems like a naughty boy lost in the woods. Even though he has been shown the exit, he still insists that it could not be exit. There exists a kind of self-exile in his own world, a kind of desperate mood which does not want to end either because he likes it or because he does not know how to get out. He might need to know that he too deserves to be happy and it is not difficult at all… We don’t have to understand or know anything to be happy. In fact the more we know, the more we might demand and it might cost more trouble.

The content of his letter was strange because it was beyond my expectation. He asks me to return to God and His prophet. I was bewildered! He is the one who studies PhD in Chemistry and he is the one working on scientific experiments for last 10+ years. I even thought that the letter was written by someone else, not by my dear friend I.Y. However, it was written by him and he really asks me to resume to my old days. He is in a kind of psychological trauma or an emotional breakdown. What was he thinking? Going to Florida and having a PhD will make him the happiest man in the world? Or he will be satisfied with knowledge, with science or with other worldly pleasures? It took some time for me to understand his letter. I wrote him a short answer but my letter did not satisfy myself in terms of content. I love this man and I have to help him instead of accepting his offer to help me. I am not the one who is in need of help! I also mentioned this thing in my letter. I expect nothing in this life other than being a good man. I only want to make people around me happy with my presence and leave something worthy behind. I don’t need to believe in the beauties of heaven to be a good person or I don’t need to be scared with the tortures of hell to stay away from evil actions. Why is it so difficult for the believers that nonbelievers can be happy as much as the believers can? And why is so difficult for the believers that a pleasure can still be pleasure even though it is not infinite. Eating might be pleasurable and it is finite. Same as my own life, same as other pleasures! You do it, you enjoy it and you lose it. It is the cycle of life. What is wrong with the people is the belief in infinity. When people believe in infinity, then it becomes harder to make people relish with what they do. As Dawkins mentions in his latest book, why can’t we appreciate the garden without thinking that the garden is not infinite and without considering the gardener?

Another thing I have mentioned in my letter was about the peace of mind. Believers think that nonbelievers are always in the mood of hopelessness. We can not be happy because we do not believe in what they believe. Nonbelievers do not deserve to be happy because they believe in nothingness. Well, to be honest, I am quite happy with being nothing after death. I was nothing and I will be nothing. And I am brave enough to embrace this fact. Those who believe can not accept this fact because it hurts their selfish infinity theories. They want to exist forever. They don’t want to lose their mind and this ambition makes them believe more in what they are told. I think, the world was here before me and it will be continue to exist after me too. I don’t know how long more but people live on this earth without me. What will be left here are our names, our children, our deeds. And this is enough to be satisfied with the life. The more a person believes in infinity, the more he/she becomes its slave. Borges mentions in one of his short essay: There is one concept which troubles and destroys all others. I am not talking about evil, I am talking about infinity.

I don’t want to mention the inconsistencies in the beliefs or other logical/philosophical dilemmas in religions. It is another problem. What I want everyone knows is quite simple. It is very possible to live happily without believing in an omni-potent, omni-scient God and it is also very possible to be a good person without God. There are people who are bad even though they believe in God as many as there are bad people who denied the existence of God. The opposite is true as well. There are good people in both sides. Happiness or peace of mind depends on the expectations in this life. If you expect to find the truth via science or philosophy, you will never be satisfied. However, life is a journey and we live to seek for the truth, not to find it. Life has a meaning since we always feel that we are on the road and getting closer to the truth. The more we dig, the more we will clarify the pieces of jig-saw puzzle. Can we finish the puzzle? As Escher’s “Paint Gallery’ picture shows a signature of the artist at the middle of the square, the truth can never be completed. It is not because we are not able to complete it. It is because we are still at the beginning of the journey. And the more we will learn about ourselves, the realm of unknown will also get bigger. We will never get to the point where we can say this is the end. This is the dynamic which also makes our life goes on. Those who believe that they know the truth and they try to spread it to the others are the ones who are hurting people instead of helping them. Believing that my truth is the truth is a deadly disease. To believe that everyone must believe in my truth is deadlier… Here we can remember the famous words of Kahlil Gibran: Do not say I found the truth, rather say I found a truth.

Believing in an infinite life with other motivating ideas would be nice but I am afraid it will make me lazy. Because religion explains the things simply, once we believe, then there is no need to worry about anything. Everything can be explained by the will of God. Then why should I bother to seek for the truth? Why should I try to understand the book of nature? A religious person can answer this question with a nice twist: We study nature to understand our Lord better. However, what happens is whenever the scientific research shows a truth which contradicts with the God’s words, then science is being sacrificed for the sake of scripture. Isn’t evolution a good example for this?

I hope this blog entry will find my dear friend… I am thankful to his thoughtful care but still it does not change my mind. I left religious dogmas long ago and happened to believe in myself. I am happy with what I have and what I do in this life. I hope he also will find his truth as soon as possible and will leave life of no-solution. Whatever the truth he wants to believe, I respect his choice. As long as he is happy with what he believes and he is respectful to what I believe, he will be my dear friend, same as in the old days of Bogazici University, walking uphill from his house to the school, our arms are tied to each other, singing some old songs while shivering in the cold wind coming from the sea… Same as the days I prepared breakfast for him and his engineer friend and had trouble to wake them up, same as the days we met in the study room and talked about our love stories like my never-starting T-distribution or his enduring lovers, same as the day I have seen him first time carrying an umbrella for a girl and felt happy for him…

08 Ocak 2007

Letters from Vietnam 56

7 January 2007 – 10:14

After finishing Richard Dawkins’ last book, “The God Delusion” I wanted to write a review on it. However, the book is too large and it covers so many topics. So I have decided to write about only the parts I like or basically I can not disagree (partly or entirely)

In the page 54, Dawkins starts a subchapter titled NOMA. He uses the acronym NOMA for the phrase “Non-overlapping magisteria”. The original acronym comes from Stephen Jay Gould’s book “Rock of Ages”. In this book, the writer claims that religion and science answer different types of questions and their domains do not overlap. Then the conclusion is there should not be a conflict. Here is the paragraph from Gould’s book. I had a little smile on my face when I read the last line of the following paragraph:

The net, or magisterium, of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral values. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven. (Page 55, Dawkins R., The God Delusion, 2006, Bantam Press)

Dawkins clearly denies this distinction between religion and science. Firstly, he believes that everything can be explained by science and if there are things which can not be explained by science, it must be because either question is asked wrong or science is not capable enough to answer them yet but sure it will be in the future. He also denies the positions of theologians in the modern society. He asks in the page 56 as an answer to Marteen Rees’ words of there is a space for philosophy and religion beyond science: What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists can not?

I guess Dawkins here makes a clear distinction for the type of the question which is supposed to be answered by the theologians. Nobody will ask a theologian questions regarding cosmology or cosmogony. They really answer the questions where science –and not other systematic body of knowledge- can not reach. The reason for this is the difference between the natures of religious knowledge (if we can call it knowledge) and scientific knowledge. “People are credulous animals and they find something stupid to believe if there is no good one to fill the gap” says Russell. Scientific knowledge covers empirical world and for scientist/scientifically thinking people, this is the only type of knowledge beside Mathematical knowledge (I believe even Mathematical knowledge comes from experiment) Then what is religious knowledge? It is not systematic, not based on scientific accuracy, and has many contradictions –even though religious people always find reasons to get around these contradictions-. Here is an example for these contradictions and biblical solution: Before the scientist discovered that earth is around 5 billion years old, people used to believe that all history was 6-7 thousand years, starting with Adam and Eve. Whenever scientist found enough evidence to show that earth is much older than what people thought, religious people first rejected those proofs. Then when the proofs became undeniable, they turned to their bible and tried some ad hoc hypotheses on the principles of bible. They said “the bible is written in a metaphorical language and we should not understand it literally”. Nobody asked them why God needed to send us a poetry book to guide our life. Wouldn’t it be easier just to write the rules of the life as well-defined principles (like in definitions in law or in Mathematics)? Can you imagine a computer guide which is written in a metaphoric language? I think half of the people who buy the computer would return the computer for the problems they have caused because they understand the guide literally!

At the beginning of 20th century, logical positivism prevailed to almost all Anglo-Saxon philosophical schools. Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer and many more philosophers, mathematicians, physicists joined them because their claim was fitting with the needs of the age. They had one main theory under all structure: A proposition must be verifiable to have a meaning. If I say ‘there is a book on the table’, this proposition can have a meaning if and only if it can be verified by right methodology. By this way, philosophers achieved to discard the questions like “Does God exist?” or “Is there life after death?”. Basically, these questions were not true questions because the possible answers were not scientifically verifiable. I think this development can be thought as a base for NOMA. There are questions which can be answered by scientific experiments and these questions belong to the realm of the real world. There are also questions which can not be answered by scientific experiments, will never be answered by scientists. These questions could be either ignored or attributed to the religion. Dawkins think that these questions are beyond science but not because they can be answered by any other means. If science can not answer, then who can answer? The holy book which was written 2000 years ago? I agree with him in the sense of ‘why we need religious knowledge to answer the questions which can not be answered by science’ but if science is not able to answer, then don’t we have to make people believe in science and the future of the science so that one day science will solve all the mysteries including the existence of God.

I believe there will be always people who believe in a God (or similar supernatural entities) on this earth no matter how advanced science we will have. As I quoted from Russell, man is a credulous animal and needs to believe something. Saint Augustine says “Once we believe there is an omni-potent God, then no contradiction remains in the universe”. It is absolutely true if we also accept that our logic is controlled by the same omni-scient God. Then whenever we can find a contradiction, we can either attribute it to omni-potent God’s wish or our uncontrollable logical inferences. In this sense I agree with NOMA but I also believe that people should be taught to ignore religious dogmas to advance. There are questions which can not be answered by the science but we can not say that these questions can be answered by religion just because there is no answer yet. At the end, religion is not an alternative for science, it does not fill any gap which is left by the science and it does not deserve any respect as knowledge. If we can not answer the question on the existence of God, we can just ignore it. This way we do not have to deal with religious dogmas/explanations on the issues regarding ethics, daily life and the value of science. The questions which are not answerable by science will remain the same because as I gave an example on ad hoc hypotheses for the text in the bible, people who believe in God will definitely find a new way to get around and skip the claims of scientists.

What we have to do is obvious and Dawkins talks about the solution in different parts of the book. We have to educate young people/children in a way that they will believe only what they can find by their own reasoning. They will think with their own heads and they will only be guided by scientific knowledge in the difficult days of life. They will not be cheated by the attractive heaven scenes because they will never have enough evidence to believe that there is a heaven. Education is the main tool to achieve this aim. The students must learn only empirical knowledge as “knowledge” and beyond the limits of proof there is no place for any other belief.

If we can have a world which does not have religion, then I believe there will be less exploitation, less lies, less tears and fewer wars in the world. At least, I have not seen a man kills a man in the name of science but the world is full of murderers in the name of the God they believe. They fight because they believe in different Gods/religions. That is why the wars never end because none of the fighters can prove that their God is right.

Beside this, religious people can ask that if there is no God, how we can possibly set the moral values. This can be seen through Dostoyevsky’s novel character in Karamazov Brothers. “If there is no God, everything is permitted” says one of the characters in the novel. This might reflect the mental confusion of Dostoyevsky. So if we deny God’s rules, we will be in chaos indefinitely and kill each other until finally humankind is extinct on the earth. Not necessarily! We can live in peace without the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament or any other holy scripture of any religion. They worry about the moral values because they can not think of an ethical system which is independent from religion. But it is quite possible to have an ethical code which can also answer modern life’s problems such as genetic cloning, stem cell research, monitoring the unborn babies during pregnancies to avoid future problems, homosexuality, abortion etc… There are millions of people in this world who do not believe in God and live peacefully. They do not believe in moral codes inherited from the ancestors but they use their reasoning to shape their life. Here is an example which is also mentioned in Dawkins’ book: http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/new10c It may not be perfect but it can be a good beginning for a future reference.

Religion creates an easy base for the people who are in need of urgent help. But still this does not make religion true. I have read “Hastalar Risalesi” (Booklet for Patients) written by Said Nursi when I was students at the university. The main question in this booklet was how we can make a patient happy if he/she does not believe in God and Heaven! If the answer is ‘Yes, a patient must believe in a super-natural power to be strong before his/her death” and if we use this as a proof for existence of God, we are making a big logical mistake. Believing in belief and believing in God are not the same things. It might work and the patient can be happy in his/her last days. He/She might enjoy the company of friends praying for him/her beside the bed. However this happiness does not guarantee that his/her friends are right in their belief and he/she will go to heaven after death. It is all believing in the power of belief. It would not be different if the patient believes in Brahma, Allah, God or Buddha!

Unlike religion, scientific knowledge based on the principles of “change” and “leaving the old one behind”. If a new idea prevails the old one, scientists change it after long term careful investigations. Nobody can say that it is easy to leave a theory behind in favour of another one. However, science is ready for the change if it is necessary. It needs patience, hard-work and ambition. If you look at the life stories of great scientists, you can see how their enthusiasm for the knowledge can lead them to the positions they achieved to hold at the end of their lives.

I would like to finish today’s blog with a nice quote from Einstein.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in the nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. The idea of personal God is quite alien to me and seems so naïve.

(Page 15, Dawkins R., The God Delusion, 2006, Bantam Press)

07 Ocak 2007

Letters from Vietnam 55

6th January 2006

Today, two female students came to me when I enter the building from the cafeteria door. Two girls asked me if they should go to their class because there is nobody else in the room except for the lecturer. First I did not get their point because it seemed to me there is nothing to worry about if the lecturer is in the room. When they repeated the question, I felt the anxiety in their voice. These two girls were afraid of being in the classroom with their teacher! I said “Don’t be ridiculous! Go to your class!” They looked at me one more time as if I am sending them to someone who is untrustable. It was one of the most stupid things I have ever seen in my life. I know their lecturer and he is one of the finest human beings on this earth. He is honest, hard-worker and a very polite person. Nothing was wrong with him. In fact there was definitely something wrong about these two girls. Both of them are very intelligent and very diligent students. But they seem they do not like their teacher either because of his skin color or his technique of teaching. Second one is not an option since they have been to his class for almost one semester and it is not time to complain. Besides this, their midterm grades show that he is a great teacher with good teaching skills. Otherwise, we would have expected some failures. This brings the first option as the real problem. Are these students afraid of being in a classroom with an African-American teacher? If this was not the real concern, then what else can be? What can my friend do to them during the school time, in a classroom where the windows in the both sides of the room leave no privacy for the teacher while he is teaching? And besides all, why would he want to harm his students? I was bewildered but still firm against their wish. I told them go to their class and listen their teacher until the end of the session. I also told them that I am watching both of you until you enter the room. And I did it! In a university environment, it is an unusual thing to do but I did! They even looked back a few times to check whether I was still keeping my eyes on them. When they were sure that I was not going to move away until they entered the room, they reluctantly went to the class. I did this for the sake of my friend who was waiting in the classroom with no student inside. I also did this because the excuse created by these two girls was beyond the boundaries of reason.


Yesterday evening I met with M. Bey from Cambodia. He is one of my friends from the same university. I don’t really remember if we took any course together but we met by means of A. who now works in Australia. He came to Vietnam just to travel together with some other Turkish national teachers. They were all at the dinner with B. Bey. I met two of them together. We sat in front of the Natalia Restaurant and had a long conversation about past and present. Later on the conversation directed towards my stories because B. Bey read some of them. He said “it is our story” when he mentioned “The Divine Joke”. The same reaction I have encountered long ago from another friend in the religious community. In fact, I said to both of them, even though there were years between them, story talks in its voice. I am not supposed to say what it means. I accept that there is no way to separate a story from its writer’s private life. However, this does not allow reader to investigate writer’s inner world rather than enjoying the story only. A story speaks in its own voice and a reader must listen to it. As a very well-known example, after the discovery of psychoanalysis, many literary critics tried to deconstruct and reconstruct great Western novels like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. What they have found is the sufferings of the writer during his exile in Siberia and his gambling habit. None of these findings helped the reader to understand the story better. Because these methods were created to read the writer and writer’s “writing process”, but not to understand the story for the sake of the story. I usually enjoy reading a novel just because it is written. The private life of the writer can be part of my attention if I like the book. Then I read the biography of the writer.

We talked there for more than one our about the stories, publishing books, writing and the changing religious communities. B. Bey said the community now needs more open-minded people than narrow-minded people. Because the world is too big and they are in need of people who can think wide. However, there is always a limit for the width of this image. How wide is acceptable? Can religious community embrace an agnostic, a social drinker? A free thinker, a writer who might complain about everything he sees wrong? I don’t think so! He himself said that he can not hug an atheist. I don’t blame him for this. This is his choice and I respect that. There is one thing I have learnt in last 6 years is the importance of my freedom. I read what I want to read and I write what I want to write. I also think I want to think, change my mind whenever I feel my old ideas should be thrown away for the new ones to replace. I learnt that nothing is permanent and nothing should be considered as the truth except for there are truths as many as human minds on this earth. Another thing I have learnt after I come to Asia is not to ask someone’s religion/belief. I randomly ask friends their religions just to know them better. Other than this I don’t care who believes what as long as they do not harm each other and they do something for the sake of society. I also believe that someone can be ethically good without the help of religion. It is possible to create a collection of ethical codes which are independent from all religious dogmas and only depends on scientific reasoning and logical excellency.

Beside my distance from the community, they are always warm-hearted towards me. In Thailand and in Vietnam, I always enjoyed their tolerant atmosphere. Since I know this tolerant atmosphere is only for those who are out of the circle, I never wanted to go back and probably will never go back. However, I should always be thankful to the friends from the community for being generous all the time.

I am perhaps one of the few people in this world who can not say what he/she thinks exactly but more inclined to keep the peaceful conversation for the sake of friendship. It is actually more visible in my novel character because I have created a character who regrets two minutes after he says things actually he never wanted to say. Basically, he is opposite of me! I do this thing a lot in my real life. I write harshly but never speak… One of the reasons for this might be my dullness in speaking. I speak quickly and mostly people don’t understand what exactly I am saying. Additionally, speaking is not a good way to discuss serious things because there is no enough time to think. I would rather writing because once I read some opinions, I can digest them first and I can write whenever I feel ready to produce something.

06 Ocak 2007

Letters from Vietnam 54

6th January 2007

Whenever I need to buy gifts for children, I start worrying about the child’s gender for a suitable toy. It happened in this Bayram too. I and J went to the hotel for the Bayram Programme prepared by the Turkish community here. One day before bayram, we went to a market to buy toys. As I remembered there were some boys and some girls in the Turkish community here, we bought toys for both genders. However, a catastrophe was waiting for us! There was no one single baby-boy in the party. All the little girls… Hopefully we had enough toys for all girls and finished the event without any regret. Later on, I thought about my attitude towards children. These kids do not know they are girls! Even if they know that they are girls, they may not know that their toys should be pink babies or walking ducks! This is all in adults’ heads. We make them boys and girls while they had no idea of being boy or girl. Boys should play with plastic guns, battery cars and shooting soldiers. Girls should play with pretty barbies, sleeping beauties and cooking utensils. The society starts to use the biological differences as tools for future distinction in genders. Girls will be mothers therefore they have to feel the pleasure of taking care of a baby and cooking. When they become woman, they feel as woman not because they are woman but because the society suppressed their other choices. Simone De Bouveaire mentions this problem in her famous book, Second Sex. Women are raised as servants to either family or child because they are potential wife or mother. If we ask modern people, they might answer in a way “it is natural”. But we must accept that nature is a relative concept and it may vary in different societies. Why can’t they play with cars? Why can’t they enjoy playing with shooting soldiers? This distinction can be explained by evolutionary idea of survival of fittest. Because this is the best way to keep the continuation of the species, Men go to war or hunt, women stay at home and take care of babies! As natural as possible! Because it works, people like it and apply it. And I am part of it. But isn’t it changing in modern countries? The more women becomes economically independent, the more their social roles are having intersection. I believe, the kids will have more unisex toys to play with. Not to choose their gender but to choose their character! A woman can be a soldier and a man can be a nurse. We all know this! Then why do we worry about the discrimination of toys!

The Bayram programme was nice with a few jokes, a lot of photos and big smiles. This is all Bayram about! Being happy with the people around, showing love to children and not leaving elders behind. J met with a few Turkish women so she might enjoy more social life in the coming weeks. Everything was nice as my expectations were not high and being among Turkish-speaking friends was more than enough for me to be happy. But still one thing kept my mind busy while listening young university students’ speeches/poems/songs about themselves, community and being in a foreign country.

I lived in this community for more than ten years before leaving it in 2001 and I know that a few things changed over the years even though many people believe that the community changed a lot. One of the many things did not change is members’ perspective to look at themselves. Most of the time, people in the community look at themselves by the eyes of other people who live outside the circle. It can be considered as a type of narcissism if we think that this also makes them proud of their own compromises. Looking at mirrors and seeing your body growing everyday can make everyone proud and excited. But as a community it can be considered as a problem if you want others to witness it just to use this as a motivation factor. “Who said what about us?”, “Why are we here?” What happened where?” and “How miraculous job we have done so far?” all can be expressed and recited in the community. “We” and “others” are the two main categories. Then “others” also can be categorized by two: Those who sympathize us and those who don’t.

Being away from home is not easy for anyone. It is a kind of torture for young people who really need the support of their parents in the time of their education. I can understand the sacrifices made by the people in this community. But what is the point of mentioning it in every meeting and trying to overfeed the emotional side of the community in every opportunity? If there are sacrifices, there will be awards. Don’t they believe it? Because people believe in something, they do it and they stay in this foreign country. Beside living abroad is hard, we can also say that it is exciting, rewarding and teaching. It is the best way to learn other cultures and languages. They are lucky to be here because they can look at the world from a different perspective. For hundreds of years, Christian missionaries travelled around the world for the same purpose. It was much more difficult I their time. Now, people have internet, telephone, air planes… Travelling is so simple, communication is so simple, living in a foreign country is so simple… Then what sacrifices they are making? It can be mentioned as a benefit more than a burden. I would say many Turkish are coming to Thailand to live. Then can we say that Turkish community in Thailand is sacrificing something to be there? It will be similar for Vietnam as well. Vietnam is a developing country and there are many new business/education opportunities here. There will be more people coming in the future and many will come for worldly reasons like myself.

Using self-whipping as a motivation factor is another thing. It shows immaturity of the people’s heart because when someone makes others cry for his/her sacrifices (or he/she cries for himself/herself only in front of others), then it means that person needs to see other people’s tears to be firm enough. If one can stand only with the support of others, then where is loyalty and faith which are supposed to be in the heart of the believer? From the perspective of Kantian ethics, “good” can not be considered as “good” if it is done for another purpose including a benefit which can be obtained later. One should do “good” only for the sake of “being good”. We may not agree with Kant but there is something important in this principle: What makes these people live in another country? The answer is undoubtedly clear: The love of God. Then isn’t love of God enough to keep them work hard and achieve great things which can not be achieved without love of God?

There was also one discussion about how we can explain the meaning of bayram to Vietnamese people. The problem was how to explain them why we slaughter the animals. It was hard because most of the Vietnamese people are either atheist (no religion) or have an atheist-religious belief (like Buddhism). This makes it harder because then they have to make them understand that this is what God wishes. It went on for a few minutes and disappeared without a conclusion.

After all the program, we left the hotel happily. I have thanked to A. Bey and D. Bey for inviting me. I guess the things I have mentioned above are minor problems and many people even do not see anything wrong with these issues. They might be right. But still this is my observation and my brief criticism.

I will continue writing on other issues later in the night.










02 Ocak 2007

Letters from Vietnam 53

2nd January 2006

I haven’t written for long time. Actually because I am writing in Turkish constantly in these days, I have stopped blogging for a month. However I have discovered that keeping my journal, even not as frequent as I used to do will be good to record daily details of life. I should write the seeds of thoughts here so that with time and more energy I will be able to build stories/essays on them. For this purpose I will update the blog at least twice a week. I guess I will have enough things to write for this frequency and writing two-three pages a week in English will not block my writing fiction in Turkish.

The biggest question for a diamond miner is when he has to stop digging. He digs constantly from sunrise to sunset so that he can feed his family. He digs with the hope that everyday is a day for a piece of a diamond which can earn food for a month. The real fear is he never knows when he should give up digging that well and go into another one for a new start. After each strike of the shovel, he says himself “one more” but this is nothing more than supplying a rhythm for the digging. At the bottom of the well, he is all alone and he decides what to do next! In these lonely hours, he hesitates between “this is enough” and “one more”.

I have been digging myself through writing for the last six years. I sometimes feel the same fear and anxiety which make me hesitant between “keep going” and “stop”. It is a knife with two sharp edges. If I stop then I will be unsatisfied with what I have achieved so far. If I keep digging, I will never know whether or not I am going to find out something worthy. It is same as Camus’ character in Sisyphus with a slight difference. He climbs the mountain with a rock on his shoulders. He actually achieves something but he can not keep the rock at the peak so he has to keep shuttling between top and bottom. Then what is the point?

I have read Pamuk’s Nobel Prize lecture twice. There are a few paragraphs I really enjoyed and I wrote on the top of my notebook. Here are those paragraphs:

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too.

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.

Before reading Pamuk’s speech, I have thought in different way. Years ago, I attended to a writer’s conference in Bangkok. She was a British novelist and it was not difficult to see how she suffers when she could not write. She told us that writing a novel is living under the skins of others. From that time till Pamuk’s speech, I was thinking that her approach was the only one. If you want to create a character, you have to think as if you are that person. But Pamuk’s approach is more affordable in terms of writing. It depends on a childish belief as he says. All people are the same. If I am writing a postman, I have to think that this postman had a childhood same as my childhood and he has similar desires as I do. The only problem with this is the proximity of all characters in different stories. If we talk about only ourselves, then all the characters will be more or less the same. Not necessarily! Writer’s personality can be divided into thousands of different characters in different ways. A soldier and a mother can have similar ambitions but their job and the people around them can lead them to different characters. This process can be achieved in the story automatically because once we have the plot and time, then the rest comes easily with the idea the writer wants to give. If the characters are fed by the writers’ own world, they will be more real and more vivid. If something is real, they can not be more real or basically they do not need to be more real. Life is real and its imitation -novel- can be real if only the imitation is done through a right mirror. Perhaps the clearest mirror is writer's own world and his own window to the reality.
Note: For the whole lecture of Pamuk on the day of receiving Nobel Prize, click on the following link: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture.html