SILENCE, SOUND AND SMELL

Sometimes the silence in an awfully big city is completely surreal and unreasonable and you ask yourself: Is this normal? How can a city of 20 million people be silent on a Saturday night when the weather is as nice as it is in autumn or during the day when everyone is supposed to be going to work or is working or in the evening when there are supposed to be a lot of people in cars going from one part of the city to another. 

Or you live in a multi-storey building with several tenants and you never hear anyone go out or come in the front door, nor when you're at home do you hear anyone in the bathroom showering or flushing the toilet or pacing the rooms, even though the walls aren't that thick and when you're in one room you can just hear the noise coming from the other room. So how is it? 

How is it that there is no soundproofing in the walls, almost no insulation and you can't hear the noise from the street, even though you live right next to the street which is quite busy. So it's interesting 😲 how the sound spreads in this part of Istanbul. Or rather, it's interestingly not. By the way, you know that the sound frequencies that humans hear with their ears are heard by other animals, but the sound frequencies that other animals hear (e.g. bats - ultrasound or whales, elephants - infrasound) are not heard by humans. However, evidence has been found that humans do respond in some way to these sounds. ☹ 

There are many ways to get sick from these sounds. E.g. headaches or not sleeping, unexplained nervousness or tension, high blood pressure, nausea, dizziness etc. So even though you can't hear and even though you are not aware of it, you have senses for these sounds that are responding to the infrasound and the ultrasound, although you can't hear them with your ears.

Compared the smog in the city to the air in your home (where you don't smoke and live a perfectly normal everyday life), feels like a spring breeze. 😄 You feel sick to your stomach and you have a headache and everything that was clean and fragrant in the morning stinks by the evening. 

Also when in the evening you open the window for fresh air and look out through it, it's like a mediocre horror movie. The lights are on in the flats and the TVs are on but there is no a single person sitting in front of the TVs or moving in the flats. This is the Elm street 💀so you hope Freddy Krueger is not around. Spooky!👻 At this point some very scary deep music would come on, slowly speed up and then something unexpected and scary would happen.

 The 'Nar' (pomegranate) also means sun in the Old turkish language. There is a holiday that is celebrated on the 21st of December called 'Nardugan' or Pomegranate Festival. It has to do with the solstice. The highlight of the holiday is when the pomegranate is cracked open, which is believed to revive nature and bring fertility to the earth.

The celebration of the solstice and the changing of the seasons is found in many cultures but their meaning and significance has been forgotten. In many places we still have holidays like Easter or Pentecost, but many people don't know what they are and the same is true of the above mentioned holidays. The customs remain, but the meanings disappear. The symbols remain, but many people don't know what they originally symbolized.

The pomegranate, for example, is a fruit loved and eaten by many. Here in Turkey it appears in many places as a motif. On art, textiles, ceramics, etc.

It is a very special fruit and one that is not only delicious but also good for the body. Just to mention a few: it reduces harmful cholesterol and increases good cholesterol in the blood, regulates blood pressure, improves sugar absorption, is a powerful anitoxidant, has a positive effect on depression and mood changes, menopause and, in addition to all this, it has bacteria and parasite killing properties. It's wonderful! ( this one too 😊 ) 

Although it is a little difficult to consume because it oozes red juice which is a beautiful colour but very difficult to remove from textiles, it is also suitable for dyeing textiles or other things. Not only does the juice have a beautiful colour, but the whole fruit is beautiful, not to mention the flower. No wonder so many people are inspired by this fruit. Just like the olive, there are many uses for pomegranate. It is used in sweets, syrups, cosmetics and much more.

There's a mythological story related to this (I may have mentioned it before...because I like it so much I tell it more than once 😊). In the story, a golden apple is mentioned, but I always imagine it was actually a pomegranate.

"Achilles' parents, Thetis, the sea nymph, and Peleus "forgot" to invite the goddess of strife to their wedding feast. Eris was offended that all the Greek gods were on the guest list but her. She avenged the insult in her own special way.

She threw a golden apple from the Garden of Hesperides into the crowd, which was said to read "To the most beautiful". 

The vain goddesses, of course, immediately got into a tussle to see which one of them would get the fruit. First they appealed to Zeus, but he wisely declined, leaving the decision in the hands of a Trojan mortal, Paris.

The young man could even see the goddesses bathing naked, but he dared not decide. Neither candidate was far from bribing: Hera promised him dominion over Europe and Asia, Athena offered him wisdom, but the young prince accepted the offer of Aphrodite, who gave him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.

The beauty in question was already married, but this fact did not deter Paris: he simply snatched the beautiful Helen from under the nose of Menelaus and took her to Troy. Ancient sources give conflicting accounts of this supposedly romantic storyline: Herodotus says that she was literally kidnapped, and there are frequent depictions of the Trojan prince raping Helen.

Sappho, however, says that she was happy to leave her old life, her husband and her nine-year-old daughter behind. In the Iliad, the romantic line is fulfilled: on the night before the elopement, they became lovers of their own free will.

The elopement is said to have led to the greatest war of antiquity, with the mightiest army of the age gathering and marching beneath the walls of far-off Troy.

The love story did not have a happy ending: the most beautiful lady was disappointed in the valour of her chosen lord, who later died in battle, Troy was ravaged by fire, and Helen ended up back with Menelaus."

NO CONTROL 

Man has the ability to exercise control over himself. Sometimes he can act against his instincts (e.g. he is afraid but does not run away). He also has the ability to override, judge and decide before he acts on something that he feels instinctively to do. 

This is not the case with animals (and some humans😊) They cannot control their actions, they act and react instinctively . They cannot distinguish between something they have to do or something they want to do.

That is why it happens that some people, for example, hear things and see things and cannot decide or distinguish between whether what they hear or see is real or artificially created. This includes internet news, videos or pictures and also when they hear rumours about people. So they also passing it on, which can then do a lot of harm to others.

And people like this tend to be indifferent to the pain and suffering of others. And they are the ones who think that "the end justifies the means".

Which is to say that they can do whatever it takes to achieve their aim, even at any cost, including people's lives.They think there are "expendables". 

This brings to mind one of my favorite cartoons, 'Shrek'.  

In one scene, the king tells the people, when he sends them to free the princess from the dragon's clutches so that he can marry her and become king legally (and because he likes her 😊 ) that "...some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm ready to make..."all selflessness! Fucking great! No. It's very funny in a cartoon, but in real life how can someone say something like that? How can someone think that they can sacrifice other people's lives for their own aim? I guess you also know people like that!

Interesting that these are the people who usually hold senior positions in e.g. big companies but also in smaller ones. They are pushy. They care about their career. Money. The position. To be "SOMEBODY" and everything and everyone else comes after.

Now they, for example, think it's normal for employees to sacrifice their free time and always put the company before everything else. Even they get a company phone (yay!), so that they can be reached at any moment, to be always available. 

They are loosing to have private life. Sooner or later they will divorce or separate from their partner etc.

I note here that I think that people who have been divorced once will remarry. A 2024 figure shows that 64 percent of men and 52 percent of women remarry. Another interesting fact that once someone has cheated on their partner, they are three times more likely to be unfaithful again.

But back to the CEOs. These are the so-called "shark" types. And I don't think that's a compliment. The shark is a predatory animal with a small brain, capable of performing only basic functions. Now, if one is a "shark" then have reached the 'fish' level of evolution, which is six stages below that of human. 

Even insects (e.g. a fly), reptiles (e.g. a lizard), birds (e.g. a pigeon) and vertebrates (e.g. a rat) arre more evolved than sharks.

So the "shark type" leaders are not in the least affected by how anyone's life turns out.. And the only thing they like more than money and power is control, which of course they exercise over others. 

We the "regular people" (or me who is a nobody, not even regular...but I am really small 😊) don't like to be controlled. 

We don't like to be told what to do, how to live, what to think, but if anybody who are threatened or manipulated will fall into that trap and suffer under the control, as happens today and in so many times in history.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

TIME AND SPACE 

The words "forever" and "never" mean different lengths of time for different people 😊 For some people, "never" means a few minutes and "forever" means a day. For some people it means a few weeks or months or years, but for others it means a lifetime and more. So it's not a calendar time, it depends on how someone is feeling at the moment. 

You can not know in advance how long something would last, because nothing is guaranteed. In fact, even those who say such words don't know exactly what they are saying😊 or what does this mean in time. All you can know is that it is probably (due to some strange dramatic reason) true at the moment for the person who says it.

Emphasiseing "dramatic" qualities, people like to use such finite words as "forever" and "never". And there's no reason not to believe that they meant what they"ve said. But because things are changeing, people are changeing, moods are changeing, situations are changeing, the words that they say can change, because everything is so uncertain that only uncertainty is certain. 😊

There is measurable time, measured by clocks, calendars, etc. and there is the so-called 'psychological time', which cannot be measured by tools, but it is just as real as the measured one. Everyone has experienced this. Forexample, when we want to achieve or get rid of soemthing can changes our sensation of the time. Or when we really want to be somewhere but it will be days to get there, time seems to be "ticking away". It's just not moving. Whatever we do. And when we're there, suddenly all the time seems short and it goes by so fast, as if the days were just minutes. So we all know this kind of feeling.

And there is also space that cannot be measured. I don't mean the space in the universe and the black stuff there, but the space that is inside of us. The one we "imagine" to be inside of our bodies. I don't mean our organs, but one kind of "mental space". Where our thoughts, our memories, our ideas are moving. It is a kind of space that seems endless. 

It cannot be measured with tools. Although I have wondered recently if there will be a device to observe this space and to listen to people's thoughts fantasies, memories and such. I suppose many of you are familiar with George Orwell's great work the 1984, and in it there is the "Thought Police" which is a fictional law enforcement agency responsible for surveilling and punishing individuals. This is a fiction written on 1948, but may not be very far to become real. 

And another example of such kind of fiction, is in one of my favorite movies, in the 'Minority Report', which was based on the Philip K. Dick's novell written from 2002, where police utilize a psychic technology to arrest and convict morderers before they commit the crime. Which is an interesting idea, I might say, but come on, who wouldn't kill thousand times his mother in law in their mind, who would dream of killing their loud dirty neighbours million times in their mind when they are fed up with their behaviour, but they would never do it! This is ridicouls to arrest somebody just by thinking about something. How thoughts are never come to life? I can tell you. Just the pervious days I was thinking about many time to bake a wonderful cake with sream and fruits and such..and! I never don it...and probably I never would or who knows. And this is only a cake!!!! Don't you think there is several blocks in people to not to kill someone, even if they think about it? Yes, of course there are many things which would never ever let someoone to commit a murder....so how can anyone "predict" by only thoughts what or what not someone would do. No way! 

It would be more usefull to invent a device which can find the murderes in no time or the people or children who went missing. This is usefull! This would serve our interest! This is realistic! This is neccessary! 

But what ever I say, perhaps in the not too distant future, a device could be implemented to monitor people's thoughts. That, I think would be a very dangerous thing and would be a serious harm against human rights, free will and privacy. I hope it will never happen, and that would be a real crime. Noone can predict anything! Noone! 

Not to mention how terrifying it would be in the hands of those who, themselves are full of fears, confusion, hatered, resentment and violence, causing irreversibale invents.