what doesn't end remains
Byproduct*40
One thing I learned at 2025 is if you don’t end what needs to end, it suspends you in time and space, the snow globe kind, but not as cute, more like a paralysis, and any movement is better than non-movement. And shaking the snow globe is not it, you most likely have to break the glass.
Of course, stillness is another thing.
It is the non-movement despite all movement and certainly outside the glass globe. I am writing this from my bedroom on a still morning. The rock that I attached a bunch of zip ties and metal strings on, is sitting still on the floor. A water bottle and a San Pellegrino bottle are sitting still on the low piece of furniture made of dark wood along with still books and a still night lamp. The scissor, the eight different kinds of tape and alphabetical stickers are sitting still on another piece of furniture, much smaller and much lighter in color than the one described before, and the different colors of oil pastels are sitting still inside its two rows of drawers. Although creased in texture, my undone bed is in a state of stillness. There is barely any wind coming from the open window so the papers taped only once to the wall are also very still.
There is something in me that seeks the same kind of stillness, but is not quite there, only reaching for it. I say that should be enough for now, as long as it is headed in that direction. This is something else that I learned this year.
I have ended many things in 2025; relationships, an addiction, and vicious cycles if I managed to realize they were indeed that, to name a few. Things that had I not ended, would have been the end of me.
I would have liked this list to proudly include other things too, like the need for validation, fundamental self-doubt, dysphoria, spiraling, to name a few. But I’m only, still reaching out for them, and that should be enough for now. It better be. I’m better thinking in these terms.
I previously said I would like to mostly continue writing the newsletter in Turkish, but in a hyperbolic self-defeat, here we are. If there is one thing that is unreliable, it is a promise given for no reason.
I wrote an entire issue before this one, currently sitting in my drafts folder, about the TV series Girls, because I had given it a rewatch after years and thought I had things to say about it. And I did but I just don’t know anymore why I want to say what I want to say. The time that passes between starting a text and finishing it can be another self-defeating action. Here I had to Google self-defeating and self-deceiving in separate tabs to see which one I actually wanted to use. I do not want to have to choose. They seem closely related.
I have been rather obsessed with Ravel’s Boléro for the past few days, actually ever since I watched Hayato Sumino perform it with two pianos. I’ve been listening to different versions, performed by different orchestras, identifying textures and finally yesterday evening on a train ride, identifying why I could be drawn to the piece so much. (I like London Symphony Orchestra’s this version the best so far or this one.)
ChatGPT told me Boléro is built on refusal, that it is almost an anti-sonata, anti-narrative, anti-romantic. This started making sense given my similar taste palette in other things. Boléro is about, and I quote, staying with one thing, trusting accumulation, letting intensity come from time and not invention, refusing to explain and justify. It is a lesson in holding a line. It is a textbook enactment of repetition compulsion, where nothing is worked through, resolved, healed and where the material simply returns.
Boléro’s snare drum became my preferred soundtrack for moving around in the city these last few days, and its pleasure in being held hostage by anticipation instead of a climax. Desire is stretched and apparently it offers a permission that says: “You are allowed to say the same thing until it becomes something else without changing the sentence.”
Now, the fact that an artificial intelligence knows me well and can connect my dots on behalf of me is another topic. Or, on a second thought, it is not a topic at all. I do not want to talk about it.
It says that my first person singular insistence, accumulation of small details, and my trust to the text with where the text wants to go, relates to my admiration of Boléro. That there is no need for an escalation through novelty but through commitment. “One gesture. On repeat. Long enough that it changes everyone in the room.”
The ending of Boléro has been considered violent, abrupt, a breaking of a spell, to which I add: a demystification. The crawling, expanding, suspending, repeating effect gets cut off because there is no further place to go, as in a self-fulfilled prophecy of some sorts, it ends because it has to, and because it has journeyed its own way to its own ending.
And this, I will say, is what it feels like to be growing up: the material simply returns and eventually gets demystified.
The flute hands the melody over to the clarinet, the clarinet hands it over to the bassoon, then another clarinet, then an oboe, a trumpet, all the while the strings have started on the undertone, then a saxophone, then the horns, the trombone, first violins, then the second violins now with the firsts, they all hand the same melody to the next instrument all the while being kept played, so the melody forms an accumulation of different instruments by means of addition, a snowball effect, getting bigger and more crowded as it goes on, with the same snare drum as the spine throughout the entire thing. And just like that, Boléro ends.
And does so very loudly, leaving you with a silence like no other, a silence that, had it not been for the sound, wouldn’t exist. Even Ravel is said to have said himself that Boléro is not music.
You listen to it not for a narrative development, not for a cohesive story, or now with the way in which it ends, you realize certainly not for the place where it finally reaches. You listen to Boléro for the process and what the process does to you.
In a way, it resembles to the act of climbing too, with the suspension of the climb created by each step upwards, and once you get to the summit, there is nowhere else to go other than down. And right before that, a short moment of stillness where you could enjoy the view from the top, all the while knowing that the climb has ended only because it eventually had to.
So let me rephrase: I have demystified many things in 2025; relationships - or the ways in which they are formed, carried out, pursued; an addiction - or what it did to me; vicious cycles - or their functionless functions; and most importantly, the stories I wrote for myself - for our stories might be the only thing that hold power over us. Stories that, if you find yourself willing to rewrite, might end in the same way Boléro does.
But that doesn’t mean that in some place else, in some other timeline, another snare drum won’t start playing, it most likely always will, and will keep on doing so until the instruments toss the melody around, taking turns, until the sound, the climb, the story is suspended in its own movement, is accumulated in its own harmony, is developed in its own terms, and is repeated until it no longer can be.
Wishing everyone a good yearly transition,
