What the

Yet again, I am vibing to one of my favorite Mariah Carey songs, “My All,” but this time, for reasons that escape me, it feels a bit off. Maybe I just can’t take the lyrics seriously enough after all those schizuationships, textuationships, and storylikeationships, or maybe it sounds more like a version of Tristan und Isolde in the Manhattanverse, when your prefrontal cortex is in its full developmental phase and has long been shrinking. I don’t know. Whatever the real reason may be, I do know one thing: this time, it not only blesses my ears with its uncoverable grandiosity, but also gives me a vision with an atmospheric, entwining quality. I feel the eternal, all-consuming, transcendent love caught in the real estate capital sprawling around the city in the form of skyscrapers blocking the sunlight from ever reaching the surface of the earth, and I ensure myself that it’s all okay, like a true lone-wolf cosplayer. Why? Because I am on my yacht, far away from the city, and it is 1999, long after the end of history as Francis Fukuyama predicted in The End of History and the Last Man, and right before the Y2K. It’s full moon, nighttime. Moonlight is reflecting off the Atlantic Ocean, blessing my Louis Vuitton nightie with its soft rays. I am clean, smell good, and feel fine, but also in a fur with Buffalo tissue, most probably of the Great Plains. My lovely wife is in the background, captured in soft focus, reenacting the silhouette of Demi Moore from Indecent Proposal, while the sky seems restless with all those diamond-like stars shining with Kantian sublimity. My son gets near me and hugs my leg, and I gently push him away like Kratos pushed his daughter in the Quick Time Event in God of War: Chains of Olympus, saying, “It’s not what daddies are for.” At this point, all I can think about is that it’s all a dream, as I should, because what the fuck.

Fuckery

I still remember the day I saw the anonymous mobs of Twitter lynching the Nasreddin Hodja for the swagger he had over the centuries for riding his donkey backward, which they couldn’t wrap their heads around for some reason. “Yeah, I’m riding it backward, yeah, I’m the most different, and yeah, I’m funny as hell,” they said on behalf of Hodja, before adding, “I’m the son of a bitch.” I couldn’t understand for the life of me why they did this, since Hodja wasn’t even a real person but a fantasy character, a model legend that is inspiring cross-generationally and funny inarguably. Then I started reading the comments section and realized, with great awe, that the fire isn’t focused solely on Hodja himself, but also on Karagöz and Hacivat. “Yeah, I can’t hear, and yeah, I’m funny, right?” they said on behalf of Karagöz and added once more, “I’m the son of a bitch.” After that, and after I saw even Keloghlan (aka bald boy) proclaiming that he is also funny and, of course, a son of a bitch, too, I started thinking about the essence of lynching. Was it just fun and games, or was it serious? Why was the content, technically speaking, fantastic? Was it just an étude in Beckettian absurdism? Was it an implosion of the inner violence sublimated non-ideally? Of course, I couldn’t figure it out. Then I found myself uttering, “You are lynching the Nasreddin Hodja et al, how fun, you must be fun at parties,” and added, “You guys are the sons of bitches of the new century.” Then, with a realization that is totally and utterly useless, I found myself unwittingly identified with the mob. Their fuckery got me.





Hasan Cem Çal is an Istanbul-based writer predominantly working in essay form. His work has been published in Manifold, K24, Kompleks, and Piksel.Bülten, among other journals. Some of his essays have appeared in catalogs of art institutions from Turkey, including Arter and İKSV. He is an editor at Manifold, an online journal on art, technology, design, and daily life.

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