Dear, dear reader, you must be used to the fact that these days I am almost always late with the column. All I can tell you is that everyone runs into periods when—for whatever reason—one simply cannot meet deadlines.
Anyway, I am writing this column while sitting in a place as far away from Istanbul as you can imagine—Gourock, Inverclyde, Scotland! I came here for the first time a couple of weeks ago to visit a friend and colleague whom I had never before actually met, although we have been corresponding about this and that for a few years now. It is this man whom I have to thank for helping me create my website (http://www.istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/) because, while I have wonderful ideas, I haven’t even the faintest idea of what ‘html’ is! I came so as to be present for the opening of his art gallery (http://www.kempockdigital.co.uk) and quite liked it. For one thing, I ran into people who had actually read some of my scholarly work, which just doesn’t happen to me in Istanbul. For another, since I hadn’t spent more than a single afternoon in an English-speaking country in some thirteen years, the whole experience proved to be something of a culture shock—big time.
My summer job in Istanbul allows me quite a lot of free time since the project I am working at requires me to work intensely for three and four days at a time with long intervals in between, and since my beloved continues to be up to his neck in cultivating his new business (which he has devoted himself to as if it were a baby now scarce more than a year old) I have—how can I put this—a hell of a lot of time on my hands, and so when the art gallery generously offered to fly me back here so as to develop a project we are working on I decided to take them up on it.
Now, believe it or not, there is a connection between Gourock, Inverclyde, Scotland and Istanbul, and the rest of this column is going to be devoted to explaining exactly what that connection is.
First of all, there is the fact of a rather striking similarity between the view I am looking out the window at this very moment and what I see when I sit in a café, say, in Rumeli Hisar looking out at the sea. While here the mountains that lie beyond the stretch of the River Clyde I’m taking in are decidedly less built up than those I see on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, there is much that is the same—the water itself, which has currents that can be dangerous, just as those in the Bosphorus, the shape of the mountains, and the sky above both. Of course, the people of Gourock—a village with a population of around 10,000—live in much the same proximity to their piece of water as we do in Istanbul. And of course there are stories of the river here, obscure pieces of lore concerning the particular kinds of fish that swim in these waters, legends about times gone by, thing like that, just as we have about the Bosphorus.
Then there is the connection between our car ferries—those great big things that ply the waters between, say, Karakoy and Besiktas and Gourock. It seems that our car ferries were actually built here in Gourock about twenty years ago and were sent over the sea to Istanbul from here!
Then, finally, there is the germ of a connection that I am cultivating even as I write. That has to do with an artist whom I met here—George Wyllie—and a new art gallery in Rumeli Hisar. George Wyllie is a sculptor (who also paints occasionally) and his work is quite well known. It was George Wyllie who made that great Paper Boat which set sail from London and arrived in New York in 1990. I met him on my first visit here and when I explained my feelings for my beloved and for Turkey (and of course I explained to him all about kara toprak and what that means and things like that), and told him all about life along the Bosphorus—you know, how we have all those not-so little now former villages, etc., he was quite taken with it. It really seemed to fire his imagination, catch hold of something in him and we really “hit it off,” as we say in English. Whereupon a plan arose to try and have George Wyllie Wyllie exhibit his work in Istanbul and so, when I returned after my first trip here, I immediately set about to talk with some gallery people until I found someone who I think is exactly the right person. I returned here because the gallery George Wyllie works with here wanted to harden this plan of bringing his work to Istanbul and wanted to have in person talks with me about the gallery in Istanbul and so forth. They actually sent me a ticket to come! It all seemed too good to be true, and so here I am, writing you from there.
The thing about George Wyllie is that he doesn’t simply create pretty, decorative pieces. George Wyllie's entire life is about trying to create art that for him is first and foremost a means of making people’s eyes bigger, of helping them see more. He believes that each human being is comprised of a body, a mind, and a spirit and feels that the crisis in which contemporary humankind finds itself is directly related to the fact that in most cases the connection between the three is hardly developed at all and certainly almost always out of balance. For George Wyllie, balance, equilibrium, is critically important to achieve and he aims to help those who encounter his art regain that.
What we are talking about is having him come to Istanbul and find objects from Turkey—found objects and objects from our earth and from our sea—stones, wood, shells—and create sculptures that will then be mounted in what we hope will be a major exhibition. This idea struck me as poetic when I first heard it and the gallery owner here in Istanbul with whom I have discussed seems equally taken with it. We will see what comes of this and I will certainly let you know the outcome.
One aside: it’s come to my attention that there are some people who cannot understand what on earth a project like this has to do with my work. I have always taught English here because that is the only way I found to make money here, and, as you all know, ekmek parasi is important and necessary. However, by training, I am a historian of religions, with a specialization in mysticism, esotericism, and women’s spirituality. For the past ten years I have also worked a lot with an idea called ‘transdisciplinarity.’ Throughout my time here in Istanbul I have continued to do my scholarly work—my articles are published in books and I go to the occasional conference to present a paper. That’s my “real” work, if you like, my “other” life. Anyway, the central focus of my work has always been to critique something philosophers call “ontological dualism,” which simply means that you think that Reality is somehow divided up into Subjects and objects. (1) The Subjects have feelings and are important and the Objects don’t have feelings and certainly aren’t important. Another way this shows up is in the split that happens between the Self and the Other. You know, the kind of thing that happens when North Americans, say, look at a far away (far away to them) place like Turkey and think of Turkey and Turkish people as somehow belonging to another species, or when people in accounting look on people who work in computer programming as aliens, that sort of thing. I know that it happens all the time, but for almost twenty-five years, all of my writing and teaching has been focused on this problem. I call it a problem because I simply do not think that things have to be this way. I have always believed that it is within our power to heal splits like that, to make things whole. An artist like George Wyllie who is using his art in an attempt to heal the split that he sees in us—that split between the mind, the body and the spirit I explained earlier—is doing, or rather, trying to do, the same thing with his art that I tried to do with my teaching when I was at the university in California and that I still try to do with my writing here. It’s a very exciting collaboration. It makes incredibly good sense to attempt to make this happen in Istanbul. It will undoubtedly enrich the Turkish art scene, an arena that is already incredibly rich and vital, and will most like pave the way for future projects involving Turkish and Scottish artists, and all of that will almost surely do a great deal to show everyone involved that we are all, after all, cut from the same cloth; that is, we are all just human beings trying to learn what it means to be human.
And finally, of course, if the thing comes off, the project will happen in Istanbul, the city of dreams, and that pleases me very, very much.
Notes:
1. It is a mistake to be put off or frightened by language like this. I really have explained it here and so you are free to forget the phrase “ontological dualism” forever because now you know what it means.