zai

“I just sit. Or I walk and walk.
Or I stand somewhere looking at one spot.
And it seems to me as I stand here that I am totally disconnected from the rest of the world around me. Nothing, absolutely nothing connects me with it.
The world around me goes on being busy, conducts its wars, enslaves countries, kills people, tortures. The real world...
My life till now seems to have slipped through this real world without participating in it, without caring about it, without any connection to it. Even when I was in the very middle of it, I wasn't really there.
My only life connection is in these scribbles.
Here I stand, this moment, now, with my arms hanging down, the shoulders fallen, eyes on the floor, beginning my life from point zero.
I don't want to connect myself to this world.
I am searching for another world to which it would be worth connecting myself.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“zeynep beni bekle / gece ağaçlarına
yağmur çiseliyorum / cam tozu su beyazı
yalnızlığını mutlaka değiştireceğim
bir yaprak halinde süzülüp saçlarına
eski teşrin'lerden / kederli kırmızı
zeynep beni bekle mutlaka döneceğim
söyle kim önleyebilir buluşmamızı
geceleyin ışıkları söndürdüğün zaman
benim şiir kitaplarından sızan aydınlık
elinde uyuyakaldığın heyecanlı roman
pancurların çarpıldığı lodos geceleri
rüzgârın değil benim / pencerendeki ıslık
her akşam koridordaki ayak sesleri
yanlış çaldığını zannettiğin telefon
zeynep beni bekle mutlaka geleceğim
hem bu ne ilk ayrılığımız ne de son
pikapta eminağa acemaşirân saz semaisi
sokakta çocuklar saklambaç hırsız polis
hayat akıp gidiyor olsam da olmasam da
saati durmamalı ufak sorumlulukların
resmi bırakmadın ya / son çektiğin hangisi
bak mektuplar birikmiş yine masamda
fakülteler açılacak bak bugün yarın
zeynep beni bekle mutlaka geleceğim
başladığımız filmi birlikte bitireceğiz
kim ne derse desin içimde delice bir his”
― Attilâ İlhan

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now. Through the hard century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted such as one could hardly believe the old veteran could have produced. ‘Yes, it is the same oak,’ thought Prince Andrei, and all at once he was seized by an unreasoning spring-time feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife’s dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the moon, and … all this rushed suddenly to his mind. ‘No, life is not over at thirty-one!’ Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. ‘It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace