HAND MADE BEAUTY Ali Rıza Gelirli
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HANDMADE BEAUTIES Ali Rıza Gelirli
From communicating with smoke, we have reached the age of letter, telegraph, desktop, laptop, mobile phone, palmtop computer, internet. These were the necessities of life in order to give meaning to the age in which they existed. Isn't what we call life, consciously or unconsciously, whether we want it or not, if we are alive and breathing, isn't it being able to give a form or shape to this formless and shapeless piece of life we were born into? Isn't life about choosing/approving or rejecting one or more of the things, possibilities, probabilities? If you ask me, that's exactly what it is...
This is the case, but how does the human being try to do all this ‘shaping’ work? Does he do it as a candidate to be one of the owners of the earth, or does he want to do it as a candidate to be the owner of a part of the earth/ a country? In such a dilemma, of course, he does not prefer to be an ordinary inhabitant of the earth; he wants to be the conqueror and protector of a limited piece of land. This is where the ‘handmade mistake’ called politics puts ‘useful’ tools in the hands of human beings. The organisation we call politics is an activity that needs more and more virgin blood every day; otherwise it cannot reproduce itself... It has a ‘mathematics’ and a mind that makes impostors look like heroes and heroes look like impostors. When you look at the side that politics points to, you lose, because the real ‘game’ is played on the side it does not point to.
The situation of the so-called ‘intellectuals’, who are expected to be the mind and conscience of the country and who are involved in politics, is deplorable; their ability to move rapidly between the most sacred and the most vulgar is astonishing! Of course, in this way, the intellectual mediocrity we are in is collapsing...
To put it bluntly, all politicians are determined to save the world. All their policies are based on saving the world in the final analysis. Whatever has happened to us has come from those who want to save the world. We must get rid of saviours; first of all, we must stay away from them... There were times when I was a candidate to save the world. It was an empty endeavour... However, it turns out that being honest with oneself, being sensitive and responsible towards the environment one lives in, and opposing the delegation of decisions regarding one's life to others is the shortest way to the real salvation of the world.
It is clear that we are products of the society we live in. Our subconscious mind is shaped by the culture, morality and understanding of life of the society in question. As such, we become the puppets of our subconscious. Of course, there are few people who can take their subconscious out of the control of society and put it under their own control. In my opinion, being a candidate to realise such a ‘decision’ is a more ‘sacred’ task than saving the world. It is possible to realise this mission by transforming ‘handmade evils’ into ‘handmade beauties’.
What we need, then, is a new identity of the people of the earth. I think that the human being has one kind of identity, and that is the gender identity that he/she acquires even before birth, in the womb. In other words, we are male or female; that's all... All other identities are cultural, therefore artificial. They are antagonising; they feed militarism. In that case, I should say that removing the burden of cultural identities from being a focus of problems, transforming them into another ‘richness’, is the first way to reach ‘handmade beauties’. Since cultural identities are not ontological/ innate and artificial...
The identity that will bring forth the ‘handmade beauties’ I am referring to must not be contaminated by politics, and all its basic parts must be our own in terms of its goals, objectives, paths, ways of being. In other words, it must be ‘original’. With such an identity, it is very possible to transform life into art instead of a battlefield. Think of a painter, the colours he uses, the subject, the composition, even the condition of the canvas, can distinguish him from other paintings, turn him into a masterpiece or an imitation. Isn't this also the case with human beings? Either a copy of the culture/identity he/she was born into, or someone who transforms life into art as an individual with ‘all the parts’ of his/her own...
Kant makes the following statement about happiness, which I try to describe as ‘handmade beauties’: ‘Happiness is an ideal of the imagination, not of the intellect.’ However, Kant has another determination: ‘Nothing straight can be made out of the human being.’ Here I will not try to prove that Kant may have contradicted himself. I will only say imagination, imagination, imagination. Was it for nothing that Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’?
Because ‘handmade beauties’ are hidden there... Not in manufactured, packaged identities and ideas. It should not be forgotten; true happiness is something ‘handmade’.
