göktuğ's blog

These lines from a poem by Álvaro de Campos (who's in turn a "heteronym" of Fernando Pessoa) constitute one of a few couplets of poetry that I have somehow memorised, "somehow" because I rarely do well at memorising, save for some involuntary exceptions like these, that i just cannot seem to forget. Anyways, with these lines, and Pessoa's (and his pessoas's) poetry in general, I have a weird relationship. See, as indicated by these lines, which roughly translate as "on the eve of never-departing, at least there is no packing to be done", reflexive of Pessoa's biography, there's this peace that is found in being stationary, in not upsetting one's orderly and plain life with adventures, infatuations, wanderlust. Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, at some point in his life decided to never travel, never leave Lisbon. On the other hand there is I, who, since childhood, both yearned for travel and relocation, and was surrounded by immigration, of various kinds. On top, this silly me has never accepted that, just because I spent years on something, I should for some reason stick with it, even if I don't like it anymore and I have found a new curiosity to chase. If it were not for economic circumstances and for political nonsense hindered my dreams and plans, I would've spent most of my 30 years of life so far travelling, switching academic interests, and just casting my childish interest onto anything i can manage to. And yet, I also love Pessoa's poetry, I love "Na véspera de não partir nunca", and not merely aesthetically, but also as a peaceful place.

That's to say, I don't know how to start this post. I find myself at a junction in life; it is reminiscent of those complex roundabouts that have smaller roundabouts in them, and I have this feeling of slowly approaching this round-a-round-a-bout-a-bout, being terrified by it, while also pressured by other cars I "share" the road with to just take it on and preferably take the easiest exit, but also wanting to deal with it on my own terms, and head out only from the exit I desire to use. As this poor analogy I just abused must indicate, I feel confused, restrained, distressed, and determined all at the same time. I am wanting to pick a course, a risky and for-me-uncharted one, but I am struggling under duress because the world doesn't want to wait for me, the world wants me to rush it and take the path of least resistance, it wants me to get out of its way as soon as possible, even if that would mean for me to end up in a place I don't want to go. It's telling me, on the eve of never-leaving, at least there's no packing to do.

As I once told an old friend, what I love in the above couplet is the "negative space", the what's-left-out. Those lines, and the rest of the poem, describe a pleasant, peaceful stagnance. What I love is embracing the tumultuous but unfettering disarray that's found in the blank spaces around its letters, the joy of disobedience on the face of bridling expectations, in order to boldly pursue who one really is. And once again in my life, I find myself feeling like I am about to upend my future plans and redo them, and wanting to sail into an unknown, rather than to settle with an incomplete realisation of myself.

I don't know if I am expressing myself well, but emotions, especially confusing and confused ones, are difficult to communicate, and emotions, dear reader, matter more than the concrete facts, because they are never adequate at completely explaining why things happen, why decisions are made, why things change. The refusal of which has for centuries bred people who are unable to communicate. Anyways. Perhaps I must do what all "competent" writers do, and just leave this part up in the air and jump to the next thing.

That next thing being, I am near the end of my master's in linguistics. In summer 2018 I graduated as an Italianist, that is, someone who is ostensibly trained in Italian language and literature. I was planning to do a master's in comparative literature, and pursue a career in comparatistics and imagology. I was fairly fascinated by the work of Joep Leerssen, and I wanted to apply that to the origins, development, and maturity of Turkish national identity. But then my interests shifted, and I worried I couldn't find academic positions to do such work, and after a brief crisis I ended up on the path that lead me to starting my master's in linguistics in fall 2019. The study of literature hadn't satisfied me, same was the case with comparatistics, and same ended up being the case for linguistics, as I began to discover in the recent months. All for different reasons, reasons which are relevant details here but I will not dwell on much, at least right now as I type these words up (it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out that I hardly re-read these posts before publishing, let alone planning and/or editing; this is mostly a therapeutic stream of [quasi-]consciousness). I tried a lot with linguistics, I tried to create a niche that would satisfy me, satisfy my desire to do work that is both socially relevant and also "linguistics" enough to be acceptable in linguistics departments, I dabbled in statistics (which in retrospect was so awful it could be considered self-harm; even though I appreciate knowing the behind-the-scenes of this crooked phenomenon of statistics-ification of all social science), but it didn't work out. My thesis, which tried to be everything at once, was rejected. Currently, I am slogging through the process of decimating it into an ordinary, uninteresting, but normal and acceptable nothingness (which is a process that is sucking my soul out of me).

In which context, I had a moment of... recollection? brilliance? realisation? Something, some spark, some scintilla of Mnemosyne. And I realised what I left out in the above story. Not in this text of this blog post, but in my self-narrative: my brief encounter with history at university.

I began the Italianistics course of Istanbul University in 2014. But my first foray into higher education was in 2012, in the year I graduated from the hell that was high school. That year, in the fall semester, I was an undergrad student in the history programme of the same university. I quit it pretty early on, after being intimidated by the prospects of learning Ottoman Turkish, which was also a highly current, and ideologically and politically charged topic back in that day. Besides, I was worried about my future and had found the solution in trying to get into a computer science programme instead. Which was a pursuit that would thankfully fail, both for the lack of desire and of funds and peace of mind, and I would end up in Italianistics, through some hilarious series of events that lead to me rediscovering a love for literature, and dreaming up some plans that were mildly outlandish, when observed with the benefit of hindsight. Anyways.

Anyways. That little foray into an history undergrad was not as accidental and fortuitous as it seems. In high school I was... well, beginning in middle school and all throughout high school I was a very depressed, troubled, bullied, lonely teenager. I had turned from a "gifted" kid into an adolescent that cared nothing for school. I would skip as many classes as I could, I wouldn't bring my backpack, books, notebook, anything to school, and whenever I could I would slip away from the school and tour the city using public transport. But, the situation was different when it came to the history classes. In high school, except for first grade that was at a different school, I loved my history classes, and my history teacher was a very nice person (❤️ Beyhan hocam ❤️). So, I liked history, and I did well in that class, because I was not skipping it as often and when in class, I was listening attentively. Furthermore, the nerdy little me that was too young to go to school had grown up fascinated with history found in the encyclopaedias of my mum's, what she had acquired by collecting the fascicules given out by newspapers in her youth, and also I had absorbed my grand dad's curiosity for the topic, which unfortunately he was too much of a poor and uneducated 1950s emigrant to pursue. In that light, perhaps it was much more befuddling that I quit history after a couple weeks' classes, but well, life was rough, and I had many worries, perhaps too many worries for such an emotionally and psychologically tortured 18 year old as younger me.

And I must say, I don't regret it. I don't regret exploring myself intellectually, and pursuing my interests and my own economic and psychological salvation. Moreover, I believe that I am much more equipped to become a worthwhile scholar of history today, due to all that academic and emotional wanderlust. In refusing the peaceful appeal of never-leaving, I believe, this odyssey of mine made a much more sound learner, researcher and scholar out of me. At length, the fox is brought to the... Ithaca, Well, that is another analogy that won't work, so let me sneakily abandon it, but without deleting, so it might occupy your mind for the rest of this logorrhoea.

At a moment it dawned on me that I would never get out of linguistics the things that I wanted, not without too much struggle, not without subjecting myself to clueless people who could suggest me that my involvement of the notion of neocolonialism in my thesis somehow requires a dialogue with the work of Sartre, for example. It all clicked into place: I was interested in urban matters, urban identities, i was interested in houses, types of houses, housing that served people like travellers, students, bachelors. Separately, I was interested in history, I loved history. Separately, I desired to be a critical scholar, with a mind for justice, especially in issues where I found myself as the precarious side. I noticed that I was trying to materialise all these as a scholarly quest in linguistics. A discipline which currently, and in its recent history, is unfortunately under the violent influence of a variety of positivistic, anti-humanistic persuasions. With every passing day I became more and more aware of the fact that I too was persuaded by some of these tendencies and cliques, and they were guilty in straying me from my path. The desire to move on from linguistics grew in me, gradually, then suddenly.

It was not immediately clear where I could go from there. I was already planning to move onto a part of language studies that was less bothered by microlinguistics, and even macrolinguistics. Disciplines of rhetoric or communication studies were intriguing, critical cultural studies were intriguing. But the combination of some media I listened to, and the above realisations lead me to my old favourite, history. Along with the realisation that, with a base in the discipline of history, I could re-adopt the study of discourse, of identity, of literature, in new, more fruitive, less positivistically-constrained settings.

So, today, I am three weeks away from defending a thesis where I do a rudimentary genre analysis, while I also browse and make notes to help applying to PhD's in history. On the eve of upsetting an unpleasant stay, at worst there's a costly freedom to be enjoyed!