*excerpts from everything after Prague including Athens, Şirince, Kaş and İstanbul*
An interchangeable dragging with living.
An interchangeable living with novel writing.
*
It was this week Monday, in the afternoon, when I was sitting in the cafe in central Athens located in a tiny passage in one of the smaller streets cutting the main one leading to Acropolis. And before that, last week, in Prague, I was talking (performing) about creating smaller spaces within a large space to feel nevertheless large in it, as a strategy to cure the ego, and probably not an eating disorder. Feeling large never really helps with that. But the ego loves it.
So a passageway does the job for me scaling-wise and also with feeling special in a big city. I start itching on my upper arms, an omnipresent tickle arrives in intervals and to various different spots around my body. It’s not painful, just suspicious. I look up to search something of the kind of a spider web, as the source that might be making me itchy in a gentle, soft but still very annoying way. Earlier that day I had climbed up to the Acropolis, going around the Parthenon and the gardens, thinking about how happy I am to find a new mountain. A very old mountain. How happy I am to see that I was not alone in this quest to build our entire existence around and on top of mountains (hills), and that it has been thought of even way back in 5 B.C. If Athena loved it and found it appropriate, so can I. It makes so much sense. Civilization makes sense sometimes. Other times it does not.
*
Now I’m thinking I’m ready to make mistakes again. I have been doing this exercise, copied from the clipboard, no actually from a friend’s thesis chapter, writing everyday for twenty minutes with a timer on. In contemplating about traders and olympic athletes recently, I think of why writers should also not train themselves everyday, minus the intrinsic hatred you would feel towards your trainer because a writer works alone and the only person to hate it is themselves. But I’m over it. I am ready to make mistakes again.
Usually I spend those twenty minutes very sterile, just papers, a pen, and a timer. Ideally on a desk or table. But yesterday I wrote for the time until my friend came to join me at a cafe, melon ice tea, new manuscript, new boy, should I get excited over any of it? Annoying to still be wearing a light jacket at the end of May, I was itching but not anymore, falling out of connections I didn’t think I would, and of course I have certain people in mind saying that. A toast to new friends!
I’m ready to make mistakes again. I’m alive, I’m a magnet, I’m a landscape. Let’s go.
*
Reporting now from fearless love. The taste of adrenaline is not felt in the mouth but sort of tingles through my entire body and next thing I know is I want to learn boxing so I can fight my lover on the ring.
Different versions of Istanbul written, long-featured, told and discussed free us from our stories. Claustrophobia became a translucent cage. Come govern me teach me refuse me. I am as hard as a rock.
*
I just came back from a village down south between the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, where dogs reign power and archeologists praise ruins. Daily routines were a thing, if anything, you had to hydrate very often throughout the day, eat three half meals of fresh local vegetables, swim in the cold pool to keep your brains cooled off, and go watch the stars at night, for they create the most magnificent image of a dome made of interconnected light sources - their interconnectedness decided by humans and often forgotten in the city. Clouds are only shaped like clouds and nothing else. Dogs don’t speak. Crickets make their repetitive sound as a mantra for the summer. Then there was the mountain. We’d go up the rocks following paths of wild thyme to watch the sunset after dinner. Everyday the group grew larger and by the time I had left, the village had brought along musicians up there with them because why not. I remember my very last time lying on the rocks of the mountain the day before I left, feeling the warmth of the sun collected throughout the 37 degree weather day, making us feel like we might in fact be lying in a hammam on the warm stone waiting to be touched and washed by a stranger. We spoke of how amazing it must be to make love up here on the warm rock after the sun went down. Something in me knows there will never be a combination of lover + me on a mountain making love. Some beauty shall only be experienced for the self, alone.
Now I’m thinking of all the prophecies that came to be true. How we actually don’t need all that much to live. The french press can stay and the extra pants can go. It was a beautiful afternoon walking down the tram tracks when my friend spoke about her thoughts on consumption - the beautiful moment of experiencing a reciprocation of thoughts. I know what you are talking about, I just probably make different sounds talking about it. Consumption is of value when it includes the knowledge of how to reuse the concept. Consumption is about leaving a mark. A maker can also be a consumer and a deaf man can very well publish an anthology. That’s why I am obsessed with the question of how. Let me not eat my lunch.
*
Curiosity kills the cat.
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Curiosity births the lover.
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Pick a word to forget for each day. Word of the day: Winning.
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Actions preceding thoughts and not the other way around. Questioning the function of the grammar tool negation. Abstraction or concretization?
I love you mom.
reads like a smooth come up of a faintly intoxicating re solution hardwired to summer itself. Thank you Z