Zehra Ana ve Karakız

Karaşar Çukurören Yaylası

...Ve Karaşar'dan Köroğlu Dağlarına doğru orman yolundan yolumuza devam ediyoruz. Çukurören yaylasına ulaşıyoruz. Biz çeşme başında Karaşar'dan aldığımız köy ekmeklerini, domates, peyniri yemeye hazırlanırken, Mustafa Bey bizi biraz ilerdeki çardağa çağırıyor. Yaylada herkes ya akrabası, ya tanıdığı... Ev sahipleri bize ayran, peynir ve tereyağı kıvamında enfes bir yoğurt ikram ediyorlar. Mis gibi köy ekmeğinin üstüne sürüp yemenin tadına doyulmuyor...

Burada tüm hayvanlar açıkta otluyorlar. Yani tüm yedikleri doğal. Dolayısıyla süt, peynir, yoğurt ve yumurtaları da tamamen doğal. Hormon ya da kimyasal madde içermiyorlar. Yaylanın suyu harika. Köroğlu Dağlarından gelen kar suyu... Keşke bidon getirseydik diye düşünüyorum...

Zehra Ana

Sohbetten sonra teşekkür edip etrafı dolaşmaya ve fotoğraf çekmeye çıkıyoruz. Derken Mustafa Bey bir başka eve doğru gözden kayboluyor ve bizi çay içmeye çağırıyor. Ev sahibesi halası. Zehra Ana çok hoş sohbet bir hanım. Bizi bırakmıyor, çay ikram ediyor. Mustafa Bey'e "Mıstık" diye hitap ediyor. "Biraz evvel gelseydin odun taşırken sırtımda yükümle fotoğrafımı çekerdin..." diyor, elimde fotoğraf makinasıyla beni görünce Zehra Ana. Fotoğraf çektirmeyi seven bir model bulmuşken "Gene çekerim..." deyip makinama sarılıyorum. "Ama arkası aydınlık, burası gölge, karanlık çıkar yüzlerimiz..." diyor Zehra Ana bana dolgu flaşı kullanmam gerektiğini hatırlatarak...

Yaylada elektrik yok. "Gece o sizin oturduğunuz yere oturuyorum" diyor Zehra Ana, "Şu karşıki tepenin ardından ışıklarını yakmış uçaklar çıkıyor teker teker, şu tarafa giden İstanbul'a gidiyor, bu tarafa giden Ankara'ya..." "Aydede tepeye geldiğinde saat yarım oluyor... Kalkıp yatıyorum. Ertesi gün saat beş buçukta horozların, kuşların sesleriyle erkenden kalkıyorum. Gün doğmuş oluyor. Günün en güzel zamanı. İnekleri dışarı çıkarıyorum... İşte günler böyle geçip gidiyor..."



Karakız

Zehra Ana sohbeti seviyor... Biz tatlı tatlı sohbet ederken güneş ufka yaklaşıyor, ışıkları pembeleşiyor. Biraz ilerideki meydana bir dana yaklaşıp sesleniyor, geldiğini haber veriyor. Zehra Ana "Kızııım... Geldin miii? Geel..." diye seslenerek danayı çağırıyor. Dana hoplayıp zıplayarak sevinçle eve geliyor. Zehra Ana, danacığını çocuk gibi öpüyor, seviyor, onunla konuşuyor, içeri alıyor. Dana bizi merak ediyor, yanımıza gelip bizimle de tanışıyor... Aileden biri gibi... Biraz ilerde çocuklar koşuşturarak, seslenerek danalarını topluyorlar...

Burada herkes kendi ihtiyacını karşılamak zorunda ve herkes ancak kendi ihtiyacı kadar yapıyor. Zehra Ana'nın bir ineği, onun da bir danası var. Dana, Zehra Ana'yı özlemiş olsa gerek, erkenden geldi. İnek henüz ortalıkta yok. Her sene Mayıs ayında inekleriyle birlikte yoldan yürüyerek Karaşar'dan yaylaya geliyorlar, Ağustos sonunda da yürüyerek Karaşar'a dönüyorlar.

Burası çoluk çocuk gelebileceğiniz, hatta grup olarak gelebileceğiniz, çevrede doğa yürüyüşleri yapabileceğiniz bir yer. Daha doğrusu mutlaka gelip görmeniz gereken bir yer. Ama gelmeden önce Mustafa Beşbınar'ı arayın. Önceden haber verirseniz sizin için hazırlık da yapabilirler. Bu dünya tatlısı insanları tanımak, dostluklarını paylaşmak bambaşka...

Karaşar Belediyesi: 0 312 775 11 44
Mustafa Beşbınar: 0 536 327 08 03



Çöpleriniz İneklerimizi Öldürüyor!

Ancak çevre konusunda çok hassaslar... Etrafı kirleten, çöplerini bırakanları hiç istemiyorlar. "Naylon poşetlerini bırakıyorlar!" diye söyleniyor Zehra Ana... "İnekler yiyor, hastalanıyorlar..." "Burda kaç tanesi öldü..." Zehra Ana'yı ve sevimli danacığını tanıyınca bir ineğin ne demek olduğunu, daha doğrusu kim olduğunu daha iyi anlıyor insan...

"Elim ağırdır!" diyor Zehra Ana... "Birinciyi ıskalarsam, ikinciyi sektirmem! Taşı kafasına indiririm adamın!" derken şaka yapmadığını çok iyi anlıyorum... Zehra Ana şakacı, güler yüzlü, hoş sohbet ve kibar ama yeri geldiğinde otoritesini de hissediyorsunuz... Yerine göre de sözü oturtuyor... "Çamlar kuruyor..." diye endişeli Zehra Ana... "Kırk senedir bu yaylaya gelirim... Hiç böyle görmemiştim..."

Bu dünyada Çukurören'i insanlarıyla, atlarıyla, danalarıyla, tavuklarıyla, civcivleriyle, horozlarıyla birlikte görüp Zehra Ana'yı tanımazsanız hayata ve insanlığa dair bir şeyler eksik kalır...

Karaşar Evleri

Karaşar'da Belediye Lokalinde, Belediye Başkanı Yılmaz Koçak ve Karaşar Turizm Gönüllüleri ile buluşup tanışıyoruz. Çaylarımızı içip sohbet ettikten sonra Belediye personeli Mustafa Beşbınar bize eski Karaşar evlerini, konaklarını tanıtıyor. Hadi birlikte dolaşalım:



Sonra Mustafa Bey "Buraya gelmişken yaylaları mutlaka görmelisiniz..." diyor. En yakını Çukurören Yaylası. Ayrıca Eğriova ve Kıbrıscık yolu üzerinde Karagöl var. Hadi arabamıza atlayıp Çukurören Yaylasına gidelim, zaman kalırsa ne yapacağımıza birlikte karar verelim... Bakalım bizi Çukurören yaylasında neler bekliyor... Zehra Ana ve Karakız'ın öyküsü...

Beypazarı Karaşar Yolunda

Karaşar'a Beypazarı'nın iki yanı sarp kayalıklarla ve mağaralarla kaplı yemyeşil İnözü Vadisi'nden geçilerek, İnözü-Karaşar-Kıbrıscık yolundan gidiliyor. 25 km boyunca, doğuda Tekedağ (Tekkedağ) Tepesi, Batıda Sığıryatağı Tepesi (Keltepe) ve Karlık Dağı arasındaki vadiden geçerek rengarenk çiçekli yemyeşil yollardan Köroğlu Dağlarına doğru yükseliyoruz. Üzerimizde bembeyaz pamuk bulutlar masmavi gökyüzünü bir yorgan gibi örtüyorlar, arada güneş bulutların arasından yüzünü gösteriyor, etrafı rengarenk parlak renklerle boyuyor. Kıbrıscık'ın kuzeyinde ise ünlü Köroğlu Dağı.... Yol kıvrılarak tırmandıkça havanın serinlediğini hissediyoruz.



Devamı...

Karaşar: Köroğlu Dağlarının Eteklerinde

Beypazarı, Karaşar, Karaşar evleri, Çukurören Yaylası, Yayla evleri, yılkı atları... fotoGezi, fotoğraf ve keşif gezisi. Köroğlu'nun, kıratın ve Ayvaz'ın dağlarında, Zehra Ana, Mustafa ve sevimli dananın öyküsüne doyamayacaksınız... Devamı...

A note on James Wood's She's Not Herself

I was intrigued to see James Wood's review of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances begin with a reference to Georg Büchner's Lenz. By coincidence, I read this astounding story only this morning and am still reeling from the experience. Wood says it is "a harbinger of European modernism" and lists its indirect descendants. From this close, I'd add Nabokov's Signs & Symbols, though Wood's focus is unreliable narrators while mine is ... well, unfocussed. There is one obvious direct descendant: Celan's Conversation in the Mountains but Wood adds another:

[In] the book most obviously indebted to "Lenz," Thomas Bernhard’s devastating novel "The Loser," the narrator labors to convince us that his friend, Wertheimer, is the real "loser," while the reader can see that the poor narrator himself hardly escapes that terrible designation.

While not wishing to be pedantic (well, not all of the time), this interpretation relies on the unfortunate translation of the German original Der Untergeher, which might be translated literally as The Undergoer or The One Who Goes Under. The Loser just doesn't cover it.

Wertheimer's suicide which occurs before the book begins is a form of going-under that he and the narrator saw in the virtuosity of Glenn Gould's playing of the piano. For both, witnessing Gould's sublime talent signalled the end of their own musical careers. In that sense, both are losers. Yet Wertheimer has gone under. The narrator might then be said to be the real loser, thus meeting Wood's interpretation. But he has just written this book, the one we are reading - this sublime, virtuosic novel borne on the failure to go under.



An anorak's aside: James Wood reviewed the translation of The Loser when it was published in Britain back in 1992. As you can see from my annotated image of the clipping, he upset me at the time by calling Bernhard "a drastically limited artist, despite the bloated claims made on his behalf" (Italo Calvino, for instance, called him "the greatest writer in the world"). Oh for more limited artists! We'll have to make do instead with this week's half-dozen-or-so 750-page ambitious novels taking on or tackling the history of the 20th Century.

McEwan's silence

Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb asks: "Is it possible to survey Britain's most celebrated littérateurs and not find them repulsive?". Based on their novels alone, the answer has to be a resounding NO! But that's not what provoked our blogger's question. It's in response to Ian McEwan's latest interview in which he defends his "dear friend" Martin Amis from vaguely attributed accusations of racism. Along the way he reveals that "I myself despise Islamism". While Seymour answers better than anyone what McEwan says, I'll take issue with what he doesn't.

However "controversial" Amis's comments or "brave" McEwan's position on the indigenous culture of neo-colonies, both are red herrings. Nowhere in this interview does McEwan express any regret, let alone horror and shame, at his nation's responsibility for the deaths of more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. (There's not a word about his fictionalised apologetics either). One would have thought the continuing aggression of the most powerful army in the history of mankind and its allies would be more pressing than media-enabled paranoia about a foreign religion. In the last century, should the population of Weimar have been more concerned with rumours of Jewish "blood libels" than what was being carried out in their name just up the road?

While McEwan asks for his fellow subjects to start "to reflect on Englishness: this is the country of Shakespeare, of Milton, Newton, Darwin", he does not reflect that this is also the country of Prince "Bomber" Harry, a member of the English royal family involved in military attacks on civilians. During his time in Afghanistan, he is said to have guided fighter jets "towards suspected Taliban targets". In mitigation, McEwan can, with the rest of us, claim not to know what is really happening. After all, the London media that fawns over each of his claustrophobic and inorganic novels tends not to report that the "suspected Taliban" are often women, children, wedding parties and even herds of sheep. (Maybe we'd hear more about it if they lived in tower blocks).

All in all, it's a depressing lurch to the right. Twenty-five years ago, McEwan wrote the screenplay to The Ploughman's Lunch, a film that went against the political grain of the time. It showed in negative light Thatcherism's "promotion of self-interest, of ruthless dedication to obtain a desired goal". The main character is James Penfield, a social-climbing journalist played by Jonathan Pryce. He is writing a revisionist history of Britain's imperial adventure at Suez in 1956 in order to curry favour. As Channel 4's feature says, he is "keen to keep his political paymasters happy [by adopting] an extremely right-wing, partisan tone." There's a memorable scene at the end in which Pryce walks around the floor of the Conservative Party conference during Michael Heseltine's rallying speech. This was the famous post-Falklands War conference with the stage at the Brighton Centre designed to resemble the bridge of a battleship. It is as if Penfield is surveying the ruins of his own victory. As a person, he is empty; hollowed out by ambition. At the time I recall being struck by his definition of professionalism: "knowing instinctively what you can and cannot do".

Take a look The Afghan Victim Memorial Project and then try to curl up with the latest award-winning unit from one of our most celebrated literary professionals.

A review of Senselessness

"This is a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials." So says Russell Banks recommending Horacio Castellanos Moya's first novel to be published in English. "I've not read anything quite like it", he adds. It's a puzzling addition considering he's just compared the novel to Kafka. However, it does make one thing clear ...

Find out what by reading my review of Senselessness posted today at Ready Steady Book.

Ankara, Mogan Gölünde Kuşların Vahşi Yaşamı

Ankara, Mogan gölünde kuşlar. Podiceps cristatus (bahri), Fulica atra (sakarmeke) ve diğer göl kuşları. Birdwatching at Ankara, Lake Mogan. Fotoğrafların tamamı.

Passages of escape: new Kafka

In the post below, I began writing about Sir Richard Burton in order to point toward a collection of Kafka's writings that has never before been translated. Franz Kafka: The Office Writings is a 440-page book made up of "articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit." They were composed, Princeton UP says, during Kafka's years as a lawyer with the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute.

Kafka might not seem to have much in common with Burton except, perhaps, a rage to write. However, as Douglas Shields Dix reveals in his brilliant essay The Man Who Disappeared: Kafka Imagining Amerika, Kafka was enthralled by travel books and memoirs and, as Max Brod reported, "he had always a longing for free space and distant lands". Shields Dix explains why:

Between 1911 and 1914, Franz Kafka wanted to disappear. More precisely, he desperately sought a way out of the existential predicament of his life as he had been living it then, and towards a life that would yield him the necessary conditions to allow him to follow his chosen path of writing. It was during this period that he came to realize that the only true way out was through writing itself.

As his first novel Der Verschollene (translated by Michael Hofmann as The Man Who Disappeared) features distorted descriptions of American reality, we might read it as the lonely fantasy of a compulsive writer who never left Europe. However, remaining at home might not be the straightforward result of Kafka's "hesitation before birth". Shields Dix quotes a contemporary report of immigrants seeking the freedom of these fertile lands who turned up without any means of support before crops could be grown let alone yielded: "Like unreasoning children, they thought that could they but once reach the beautiful green slopes of the promised land, their poverty and trouble would be at an end." They remind me of the critics such as those quoted in yesterday's post who believe that if only writers would write about "the world at large" then somehow all would be well in both fiction and the world; as if fiction is a just branch of investigative journalism. It's no coincidence that Diana Sheets thinks the cardboard cut-out confections of Tom Wolfe is "our world"! Shields Dix essay explains why writers like Kafka are more likely to set us free (as readers and writers if nothing else):

Kafka's novels do not operate as a social critique, but as a mapping of social assemblages, and therefore a dismantling of them - and, consequently, as a way out. While these social assemblages appear inescapable, there are always interstices from which passages of escape emerge. We tend not to think of Kafka in this way, as his novels and other writings seem so claustrophobic and even paranoid, but the "ways out" he explores are intensive rather than extensive, and consequently they do not represent the form of escape as something occurring in the world. As I have suggested, the writing of Amerika simultaneously works through and rejects the physical, extensive escape of departing for America (or anywhere else), and opens an interior, intensive space of writing where Kafka finds a different, freer reality.

Ankara Kalesi Festivali'nin Ardından

Ankara Kalesi Festivali'nin ardından...

Sir Richard Burton: Rimbaud in reverse

Some years ago I began to read A Rage to Live, a huge biography of Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel. On the first page I looked at there was an account of how Burton got his distinctive facial scar during an attack on his party by Somali tribesmen in 1854:

The barbed spearhead of the javelin, thrust with precision and power of a warrior who had hunted and fought with such a weapon all his life, entered Richard’s left cheek travelling in a downwards direction. It pierced the roof of his mouth, transfixing the top jaw to the lower, dislodged some back teeth, and punched an exit through the right cheek.

I was reminded of this because, last week, Channel 4 broadcast Victorian Sex Explorer, a documentary on Burton presented by the actor Rupert Everett. This anecdote wasn't covered as it concentrated on Burton's army career in India and the scandalous rumours that followed his undercover work in a male brothel there. However, neither this nor the African action had prompted my interest. For all the undoubted attraction of Burton's adventures, what intrigued me is that Wikipedia's selected bibliography of books he either wrote or translated runs to 43 volumes. Everett does discuss contradictions in Burton's life but this was not one of them. Is it a rage to live that leads to such productivity? Perhaps Burton was a Rimbaud in reverse: giving up the world in order to write. It's odd how fascination with his life depends on such abnegation.

It's a fascination borne on habitual denial. We see it everywhere in literary discussion. Not long ago in the Christian Science Monitor, Diana Sheets complained that:

Literary fiction ... has become relativistic and solipsistic, donning the vestments of social justice at the expense of truth. It celebrates interior thought or consciousness while denigrating the discomforting landscape of the real.

Indeed, it is so discomforting for Sheets that she offers no real world examples. Instead, she instructs fiction writers to "dispense with solipsistic preoccupations of self and love and family – and reclaim classic virtues and the work of examining the world at large."

But then look what happens when those making such injunctions condescend to offer examples: a creative writing student in a lecture by the Bulgarian-born author Ilija Troyanov reports his demand that writers "avoid 'ego-lit' and write about something entirely foreign" which the student claimed staked out "the ground between him and Peter Handke ... and other explorers of internal worlds." As I pointed out at the time, if Troyanov's demand isn't utter nonsense, the example is.

By coincidence, Troyanov has a novel newly published in translation and, believe it or not, The Collector of Worlds is about Sir Richard Burton. From what I've read about the contents, his writing career is not featured.

Gönlünü Dikene Vermek...

Eflatun devedikeni çiçeği (Silybum marianum). Atatürk Orman Çiftliği, Ankara.

Kartallarla Dans

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Nallıhan Kuş Cennetinde gün batımında kartalların gökyüzünde dansı.

Nallıhan Kuş Cenneti

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Nallıhan Kuş Cenneti.

Nallıhan Erozyon Bölgesi

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Nallıhan çölleşme ve erozyon bölgesinden görüntüler.


Yaşamın sınırlarında tutunmaya çalışan güzel bir kuru çiçek.

Sakarya Nehri Kıyıları Kuşların Göç Yolu

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Sakarya Nehri ve Sarıyar Baraj Gölü kıyıları kuşların göç yolu...

Nallıhan Uyuzsuyu Şelalesi

Bolu-Bilecik karayolunda, Nallıhan, Göynük arasında Karacasu Köyü'nün güneyinde, Sarıçalı Dağının kuzey eteklerinde güzel olduğu kadar gizemli ve merak uyandıran bir şelale Uyuzsuyu Şelalesi... Adını Sarıçalı dağındaki pınarlardan gelen tertemiz suyunun şifasından alıyor. İşte Uyuzsuyu Şelalesi ve bahar çiçekleri.


Kurukafa kayalıkları ve Uyuzsuyu Şelalesi:



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