REFLECTIONS OF A JAILBIRD
It can be quite hard to force myself to concentrate on writing when myriad distractions abound: I have the internet, snacks at hand, and a curious mind that prefers wandering than getting stuck into the arduous task of gathering my thoughts and organising them into one structured essay.
What is worse is that there are also myriad birds outside my windows that are eager to show off how free they are - while it is me that is cooped up inside an aviary. And this has been my daily life for months already here, in the middle of Istanbul.
The world has surely been turned upside down.
And my state of being has now too.
Have you ever been to prison without being involved in a crime?
The laws of lockdown have worked; they have successfully restricting my body to the house, but it has also set loose thoughts and emotion; and the things that stir inside an idle being.
In fact, I am usually the opposite: a busy body with a braindead head â not a rioting soul in a dead body.
Thus, has been a rare chance to engage in some very unique, albeit testing, self-reflection and what I have observed is that my own mind is actually hell-bent on getting away from me.
Out of due respect for public health, I have not really been anywhere for a full three months. And during this home-sentence, I have been battling with another prison: a mental prison consisting of high walls that forbid me from doing any proper constructive written work.
The summer warmth has arrived in Istanbul; finally replacing the long, wet winter - the heat and sunlight have come and replenished the empty hole that is known as âlockdownâ. This is a very good change in events. Weather does alter oneâs mood.
The uplifting summer-scented air has called me to begin writing down a few notes to share with you all. Although, however lovely days of sunshine and birdsong may be, it seems my newly-found prison-life has offered some useful (and dire) insight into how many lives are lived.
Morning after morning after morning, I wake up in the same fashion, with the sound of pigeons outside my bedroom window. They sit there and mumble the same stuff at each other. I get up for a coffee. The sparrows chirp like mad in the big leafy trees from morning till dusk and I am always here to hear it. Now that all forms of unnatural noise have subsided over the past weeks, the world has revealed that there are even chickens living on the banks of in front of the apartments opposite me.
Who would think chickens exist in a city of fifteen million people? Well, I believe it. It is hard not to believe it when their bleating is sometimes all that is left over now that cars and engines sounds have left the room. Right now, it is a birdâs world and I feel as if I am the only living creature that sits around stagnating all day.
Those birds are busy with their lives and I am the one who is sat in the bird cage waiting for some sort of seeds to appear in my bowl.
During my lifetime, I have always wondered how come old people so often tend to be miserable.
I was confused as to why oldies were always angry when kidsâ balls come over their fence. I thought that old people should know that life goes along better when the world is a tolerant and friendly place - after all, judging by their bent posture and wrinkly skin, it could be safe to say that they have been around for a bit and should be aware of the tricks of the trade.
The world over, I have been yelled at by grumpy old people â usually for noise or some other form of unruliness. But my anticipation for some eventual grey-haired wisdom to save the day always fell through as they most often would revert back to their own form of unruliness â that being their decrepit emotional composure in the face of something minor.
I always liked to imagine that someday, I will become the seemingly only old man in the world who is patient, kind and unconcerned with little things that are of no apparent bother. I thought I would be the kindest granddad who would come out of his house, and instead of shouting with a stick in hand, he would come with a packet of chocolate biscuits and tell the kids just how great they are doing with their soccer skills.
A silent, idle life, void of real things to do and people to talk to just makes people become dank. Now I understand. A rattle in the refrigerator has the power to really piss people off. I never knew of that rattle when my life extended beyond these four walls.
In a tiny little world, tiny little things just appear so big.
Now I realise, I too, in the future, am capable of becoming an angry old man.
In Istanbul you often have company from giant seagulls which are a key part of the infrastructure of this giant port city. Istanbulites love to feed animals, and these massive birds easily get their beaks into heavy pieces of stale bread. They do not want to share their findings with others and so they fly onto the rooftops and drop it, hack at it and throw it around in order to break it into smaller, edible size pieces.
I live on the top-floor and often have to deal with them stomping around on my roof. I have a rooftop sky-window that I can open up and be part of the goings on up there, but they are too busy to care. They are very happy. I am not though, and I give them the evil stare from under the window pane. And, again, they are too busy being happy to care.
May is the month of Ramadan and at times some very rhythmic Anatolian music seeps out from behind some bushes somewhere near where those chickens live. There is also drumming at 2am each night. Sometimes I hang myself out the fifth-floor window to try to get a piece of the vibe. I always found the concept of music to be extremely fascinating. Music is such a human thing.
I admit I have felt a bit self-conscious before dancing in front of other people, but I have to say that I feel downright embarrassed doing so in front of animals. So, I donât. I am sure animals understand the pleasure in moving around and having fun, but the style we do it in⊠well, I donât know about that. We must look absolutely ridiculous. But it is Ramadan, and it is a time for celebration.
There is a family of crows that lives in a branch â rent-free â just opposite my biggest windows in the lounge area. I enviously watch them coming and going, and taking turns at sitting on their babies. They screech and caw, as I do when I think I am singing.
As I hum along to these sudden outbreaks of traditional folk tunes, I wonder why we humans feel the need to offer a bit of our own noise to an otherwise good-enough piece of music. We also like to move our bodies along with to the beat, as if that was called for. If you can get past your own two feet, that is, then this timely shuffling is generally known as âdancingâ.
So, it seems that adding some singing, some lyrics, and well, ultimately some sort of mouth and body movement to the music, it just makes it all come alive.
We humans make order of our thoughts through speech. We navigate our world through the use of the mouth; through words; through language, through lyrics, through conversation, through stories, constantly feeling the need to incessantly release some form of mouth-made noise with/to/towards/at other people: we engage in civil, amicable chitter-chatter; we emit our oral vibrations out of rage at poor kids who have lost their ball over the fence, we thrust our noises into the music as we groove along in towâŠ
âŠand somehow this makes us feel better about the world.
I can honestly say I am utterly embarrassed to be a human. But, the innate, instinctive need for talk and movement dictates our psyche. The necessity for social interaction with other people and physical interaction with our environment is indisputable. This is the source of a large part of our health. And without it, wellâŠ
We humans are a group mammal after all â perhaps more so than the feathered âfree-folkâ outside that even feel free enough to crap all over my windowsills. But it is obvious: being around people and engaging in meaningful conversation regulates our mood and emotions so that we can avoid entering the otherwise guaranteed free-fall to hellâŠ
âŠwhere a lot of us are right now.
All of this has now become starkly clear as I sit in here doing the opposite of what a healthy person does. All the animals accentuate the fact that they can get more done in life now that us human-beings have ceased to be part of the furniture; and we are not around anymore to bother them. Unless I decide to dance behind the glass or something - and that could bother a soul or two.
I mean, if you have to be a human being, then you also have to know how to meet a human beingâs needs. That is not to say I dance, but it does mean one needs to be able to think well, speak properly, and move more.
This may seem obvious and straightforward, but I can assure you⊠it is not.
Just as one may think six months at home would be heaven, and when it comes around you realise it is actually a nightmare. Human beings may sit around in their homes dressed in clothes with their fancy gadgets, but can assure you, we do not always really understand what it is that we need. Nor do we properly see things for what they areâŠ
A lot of us have never learnt to think, nor learnt to move, nor learnt to speak. Properly, that is.
Over the years, I have had a number of students who could fall under the category of âdepressedâ; or âhell-boundâ would be a better way to put it.
There is a thing called clinical depression, but this dispiritedness is often just simply an environmental, psychological, physiological or sociological inadequacy or imbalance. Sort of like a form of vitamin deficiency that comes good again with the right adjustments.
That is basically to say⊠yes, as it seems, a lot of melancholy folk typically seem to lead a full-time lifestyle of lockdown.
Try that! What a bloody existenceâŠ
I have observed many teenagers of mine who regularly take part in physical activity in their daily lives, be it sports or dance, are generally much more mentally and emotionally healthy â not to mention physically so. They tend to hold onto less negative energy and have a lighter, bouncier kick in their way of being.
Those that have good social, conversational and inter-personal skills tend to have these similar healthy characteristics. In short, those that are well-equipped to meet their simple human needs fare well in the world.
But this species of well-equipped kid is actually depressingly rare. A huge number of adults do not qualify either. That has frustrated me for a long time.
Normally at this time of year, I would be busy preparing for the summer holidays for when my students and I hit the long road with our backpacks on.
This year, that is not going to happen though, which is a pity because we were planning for some very exotic locations (Cuba, MadagascarâŠ). And it is also a pity for some of my students that are, and/or have always been full-time-lockdown-lifestylists who would greatly benefit again from a couple of weeks-long de-shackling from the mundane.
However, this virus has offered me a very unique opportunity:
With the ditching of my passport and car-keys and the forgoing of my usual travel-lifestyle, I now get the chance to exist on this great planet in another fascinating wayâŠ
By being in prison, experiencing the psychological state of depressed prisoners, getting to know and understand the inner-world of many of my students, rehearsing for when I am old, and getting to write about it all.
More unfortunate is getting to brush up on my knowledge about myriad aspects of birdlife and how damning similar it is to ours. Even more unfortunate than that is the succumbing to the fact that I am capable of using words like âmyriadâ myriad times in a six and a half page-long essayâŠ
(Period of lockdown from Covid-19)
(Some Photos from Around My Place in Istanbul)
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