Waiting for the goat to gander

So...

Once I was very much in love. "Very much" is nonsensical though, since when you are in love, that's it. It is out of the quantifiable realm. And now, "once" and "was" also seem wrong to me, because there is no time there, in that dimension. Once you see that dimension, you cannot unsee it. It is part of your world, now and forever. It's an act, not related to a subject. It's awesome.

Anyway.

So, these were the last words he said to me: "Wait Aysegul. Wait for the goat to gander. Whatever gander means."

I laughed. It was a good joke. But today, out of nowhere, I started to really think on it, to think why I laughed so hard when the situation was so dreary. So here I go.

It was funny because... it skillfully pointed out something. Something very fundamental. The impossibility. The impossibility for the goat to gander because there is no such thing as gander. I know there is such a word. It probably means something. However, the "whatever gander means" that comes right after it negates the existence of "gander" itself since words don't really exist out in the nature. They are made up by us to point to things, feelings, situations, etc. When you don't know - or really don't care about - the meaning and when you use it in a context that requires you to know the meaning (I mean when you wait for something to happen, you have to recognize it when it happens to end the wait), what you are trying to point out is exactly "impossibility" itself.

I just realized this. A few moments ago. And I laughed even harder. Because what I realized was even funnier: I was actually waiting. Actually.

I was waiting... for an impossibility to occur. Yes. This is like waiting for a bus that would never come. No, no. It's more like waiting for a bus when there is no such thing as a bus. There aren't even vehicles. No such actuality. But you wait anyway. You can't even understand, let alone explain what you are doing because there is no such concept, even in your mind.

This strikes me as the most fundamental basis in life, of life. Like when we say "in life" it sounds like there is such a thing, place, whatever "out life." Isn't it funny? How can you even think "out life?" Yet, we talk like this.

Now, we have come to the most important point I want to make if I can manage.

According to scientific thinking, life emerged at some point in time. I mean organic life, of course, since universe has a life much larger than organic life. And even universe came to being at some point where there was no time. Before that, it didn't exist. It came out of nothing. Isn't this an impossibility itself?

The true nature of life is impossible. That is what I am trying to say without going into complicated philosophical concepts, and also I can't go into them even if I wanted to, since I forgot it all - after years of reading - to do me, to hand it to whatever I am... So, waiting for what you don't know, what you can't recognize even if you see it, which was my case in this scenario, is existence itself. I am not making this up. It is logically obvious.

Here, I found another support for my fight against the disease of nihilism. Nihilism consists of a very consistent and even more distorted way of being. I don't say "seeing the world" anymore because it sounds like a perspective, and perspective is understood as something harmless. No. It harms not only the diseased, but everybody coming into contact with him/her.

This guy embodied nihilism - for me. Maybe that's why I was so attracted to him. I wanted to understand my enemy at its source to be able to fight it better. He was walking-death, and I must say this as well: death has many faces as we all know, this one was cheerful, don't be fooled, don't confuse it with joy, it's not joy. What he said - what he thought he was saying - with the goat and gander was the manifesto of death. However it was a scam, just like death is. And I felt very proud when I exposed it for what it was: just another confirmation of life. That's how I managed, once more, in my own way, to weaponize death against itself (for more on this subject, see Deleuze&Guattari).

So, waiting for the goat to gander is the joyful truth of life. Although I don't like using the word "truth" at all, now is the time. It's joyful. I like it when the "truth" is joyful because it is true only when it's joyful.

I will always be waiting for the goat to gander. And I will do it joyfully - preferably with a whip, just in case... That's the beauty of impossibility that is life.

Philosophy, location and confusion

There is a deep problem about philosophizing in a time in which globalization of the world is a common belief. It is not really an error because of the mobility of everything, first and foremost money of course. Besides, messages from all over the world are a click away. All these create an illusion that we, as human beings, have more or less the same problems no matter where we are. Well, one could not be more in error than this.

What I observed on philosophy students in Turkey is that they take philosophy as something ultimately abstract, so much so that it cannot have anything to do with life itself as we experience it. Of course we can say that most of them just don't get it just like the philosophy students all over the world. Philosophy requires a different way of thinking and most of the people find it useless. In Turkey we even have a saying which implies the uselessness of philosophy: we say "don't philosophize to me" whenever somebody is talking just to talk without any meaning whatsoever. It is just ignored. Yes, I will admit that this is not a local but a global approach to philosophy. And there is the opposite approach which is very common too. I don't know about the world but in Turkey if philosophizing is not ignored, that means you are in a setting where everyone thinks that they can philosophize too. Oh this is the worst, because they make philosophy an aggregate of cliches and by repeating cliches, the phrases such as "the meaning of life is to be happy" or "we cannot know what tomorrow will bring" they really think that they are thinking. But what I had in mind was to make a different point from inside, the strange position of the professionals.

Basicly, I think that we have different problems in this part of the world and the main problems of philosophy in the 20th century such as subject-object issues do not fit anywhere in our world. We never experienced what is to be cogito. The loneliness and the instrumentalization of the world within that loneliness never happened here. Our existence (from a cultural perspective) never suffered of being separated from the world. These are the first points that comes to my mind right now. But I don't mean that we are not there yet or that we are behind of western history in some way and that we are going to experience the same problems when we are developed enough(!). No, not at all! What I mean is things go differently in this specific location with its specific ways of dealing with the world. A little shamanism, a little nomadism, a pinch of "loving every creature because of its creator", understanding rules and regulations by their gaps and what could be done with them without getting into trouble, not being serious about anything, etc. These are a few constituents of our existence that I can think of right now. So telling someone that she is not really a subject does not have an effect other than confusion. There goes philosophy into the deep waters of abstraction. I even had a professor who said philosophy is confusion. Of course it is and remains confusion if it is not connected to its grounds. These grounds are the problems. So philosophizing in different environments require to be aware of the environment and formulate the unspoken problems of that specific location encompassing people, location, climate, language, social attitudes, food, entertainment, etc. And here the academics are talking about the death of subject or the unveiling of truth in poetry!

I don't intend to say that these subjects shouldn't be a part of philosophy in this specific location. But since I believe that philosophy should be something that feeds itself from life and life should be enrichened by philosophy, the main issues of western philosophy not only stay at a distance to life here, but also contribute to confusion about concepts which constitutes my main point.

For philosophy to be an invention of new possibilities, it is crucial to make all the concepts as clear as possible. Only after understanding the concept within the concept will we be able to invent ours. So there it goes: our problems are different than that of any people living in a different geography. Our main problem is confusion about concepts and not specific concepts, but concept of concept itself. Only after we made concept clear and invent our own concepts for various aspects of our experience, we can start to philosophize. At the moment, there is a disgusting manipulation of the confusion arising from this vagueness. And I just hate to see how beautiful concepts are used in every ugly way possible. Here it becomes a very important political issue. Philosophy could open a way out of this political and social problem. If only the academics themselves were not blind to people's confusion... sometimes it is even as if they feed on this confusion, like leeches. So where to find their genuine concern for philosophy? I don't think they have a genuine concern for anything other than surviving. So why philosophy? They could have been involved in real estate as well and as a matter of fact, they would be doing a favor to all by not worsening the already deep confusion.