an elegy for printed matter

It is a short essay by Walter Benjamin, written in 1931 while moving to a new place apparently soon after his divorce. (1) I dare not share the same title for this piece, but recently I carried my books from one apartment in İzmir to another and (re)experienced their covers, weight, smell and the apparent order of date and place of purchase, as they altogether came off the shelves after almost sixteen years.  Benjamin was the collector of antiquarian and rare books and special editions as he handsomely details in the essay. Now I realize that I, rather than having a collector’s zeal, ‘hoarded’ books and other printed matter in varied fields of interest that comprise a kind of (mental) autobiography as befits an artist and a university lecturer. Intellectualism deforms one’s will towards believing in an unattainable goal, for which the supreme end is the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.  (News came out in 1990’s that the Library started digitizing its (then) collection of close to a hundred and sixty million books and documents) No wonder Jorge Luis Borges, the librarian of Buenos Aires, is one of the stronger entries in my modest library. And still, the ‘cloud’ (the digital ether) is no match for the real thing, one wants to believe.

I assume that for a writer of fiction, the craft (and professionalism?) calls for a comparative reading  in genres and somehow shapes a good part of one’s collection of books. But then, any form of ‘creative writing’ as taught in schools calls for a wide scope of bibliography. The ‘artistic research’ that I and my colleagues praise highly while producing work and writings requires referring to titles ranging from literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, science and politics to varied theory, as well as the in situ observation of people and phenomena. In this case, one’s own library is only as good as a limited source from which the list of cross-references and hyperlinks can be attained. I remember that a lot of the books I bought came out of the footnotes and references of the material I read while writing short essays for architecture and art magazines, which, obviously, leads to older literature that one thinks should be within reach all the time.  For anything newly published, periodic visits to good libraries, select bookstores and for a long time now, web searches are essential.  As artistic research have the tendency to drift all over the place in search of a creative synthesis of knowledge, or sometimes for a spontaneous invention, it is possible to assume that it is not taken much seriously by scholars in natural and social sciences. And certainly not by historians whose meticulous (and lifelong) study of books, chronicles and documents in their original language and print is the direct antithesis of the ‘surfacing’ of history and other subjects by a contemporary artist. For them, my library is mostly about ‘leisure reading,’ part of which is made up of Ph.D. dissertations re-edited for general public and circulated by American and British university publishers.

As I go through the books, I realize how my priorities and curiosity have drifted over time. From the time I could afford to buy books towards the end of undergraduate years (mid-1980s) my interests focused around art and photography, rather than architecture that I was studying. John Berger, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin were of prime interest as they later filled up their own shelves with books of essays, novels, poetry and collected writings. Accompanying these were monographs of photographers, mostly American and some European, and their photo albums, and MoMA publications of legendary exhibitions, i.e. ones written by John Szarkowski. By the time I was studying photography in New York in the second half of 1980’s these books and others had become affordable through Strand bookstore on Lower Broadway, to which I have paid weekly visits. Later on, writing my PhD dissertation in Ankara on the uses of photography in modern-contemporary art, Michel Foucault’s theories of representation in Western-European (historical) context became essential reading, and I have almost his entire works in my library.  I was mesmerized by the way that Foucault worked as a historian of modernity and modern discourse(s) (The Archaeology of Knowledge: what a title for a book!) to bring up a critical view of the present western civilization through heterotopias, asylums, prisons and the plight of institutionalized subject. Deleuze was a later (and extended) addition. Together with (other) Frankfurt School  (Arendt and Adorno) they offered a widely expanded means for an intellectual imaginary for an artist, as opposed to the hard core Marxist and Neo-Marxist/materialist literature on capitalism. They paved the way for books by Hardt and Negri (Empire,  Multitude and Commonwealth) in understanding power and the subject in twenty first century. Books by Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard were other entries as the very early (and somehow visionary) critique of ‘extreme phenomena,’ and the evil they pinpointed had evolved into today’s highly discreet means of surveillance, exploitation and domination all along the web and social media, the mechanics of which far surpasses the speed of printed word on paper and somehow still escapes me. And for wars (Virilio), they had become remotely waged and controlled at the speed of light but the utter destruction of lives and livelihoods, for example genocide,  have not changed for hundred years, as reflected on Palestinian photographs, literature, poetry and film in Gaza.

During the ten years I lived in istanbul from mid 1990’s my library had seen its most prosperous period, thanks to the several (high quality and exclusively English) bookstores that I have routinely browsed.  Material (and left) history (i.e. Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm), many Edward Said titles,  and books ‘on’ writing history are among the stronger entries on the shelves from this time. The accumulation of capital and colonialism I thought as being essential in understanding today’s phenomena, also gave insights to see the roots of Turkish psyche and sentiment. Another field of interest from those times was the urban history of İstanbul, mainly of Byzantium, and in part Ottoman, a field bordering on archaeology. It always seemed to me, a newcomer, that the streets and the facades, and the legends, intrigue and the stories that they mostly hide are too much of a burden for an outsider, in the historical (Genovese) neighborhood (Galata) that I lived, and during the long walks I took while photographing ‘the city’ across the Golden Horn, Constantinople proper with seven hills like Rome, once the center of the world. Being a ‘flaneur’ was out of the question among the bleak remnants of empires, but the melancholia that the city induced had resonances in Benjamin, and in Orhan Pamuk’s memoirs. This setting in urban ruins, historical and contemporary, initiated much of the xurban_collective artwork we produced and showed in biennials, museums and galleries across İstanbul, in Europe and in United States around those times. My love affair with the city and its history fizzled out by the time İstanbul was becoming a hip destination for the expats, artists, musicians and a partying youth mostly from Europe, which lasted a few years until AKP dominated and shaped the megalopolis to its desires of oriental high kitsch, now topped with Dubai chocolate.  Likewise, certain libraries (of wealthy and devout Muslims) are stacked with (imitation) leather bound books of uniform size and color, gilded with (fake) gold lettering on their spine, very decorative, manifesting their authority and closely guarding their contents against outside influence.

The later episode in the short history of my library has seen the books I collected in İzmir and from other locations during trips. More than ten years ago I started making a book of photographs and essays titled The Atlas of Smyrna/İzmir, still remaining a self-published book in limited copies. (figsson.org/works) İzmir is my hometown which I left at the age of fifteen, and moved back to after thirty something years. The literature on its history and demographics began to come up early in 21st century and being limited in scope, I have acquired most of the titles. İzmir’s decline and provincialism started in 1922, after the catastrophic fire at the end of the Turkish-Greek war which devastated the major part of the city and saw the exodus of the Greek, Armenian and Levantene populations that made up its lively cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, all throughout history fire had been a catalyst for civilizational decline and an ensuing amnesia when libraries are concerned, from book burnings to the burning of the library of Alexandria. Pergamon is located around ninety kilometers north of Smyrna.

I must say that the ‘new acquisitions’ to my library declined in the past decade, and I have possibly downloaded and read far more books and articles on the computer screen rather than in print form, as I produced works for exhibitions and for figsson.org that necessitated readings on ecology and on the existential threat of climate catastrophe and extinction. One thinks that the humankind must reflect on these in deep contemplation, next to the ‘judgement day’ that may or may not come as told in scripture, and that philosophy should overwhelm theology. Much of this literature is relatively new, like by Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton and others, and they are harder to find in bookstores and libraries around. Some of the material to go along is on  archaeology, not of specific sites per se but on archaeology of deep history in tandem with anthropology, as the landscape and scenes constantly recall while living in Anatolia: Gaia meets prehistory.  As I read them I developed a tendency  to retrospectively consolidate the catastrophic deeds of our time as they dictate an intellectual’s discourse, from neoliberalism to emerging oligarchy and facets of fascism, racism and political Islam; to genocide, animal liberation, extinction and climate: in short, all being diametrically opposed to a socialist utopia, one wants to believe. All this apparently not-so-in-depth survey of diverse topics resemble the workings of decent journalism of the investigative kind as taught in good schools.  I realize that reading pieces of journalism (not the news-reportage kind) also shapes the structure of sentences one writes. But then, unlike in journalism, an artist has the liberty to conclude in political rhetoric and aphorisms.

There are a good deal of titles on other topics to be found on the shelves, from popular science to art theory and history, classical philosophy, archaeological guidebooks, city guides from around the world and to a few rare books of photographs from early Turkish Republic from 1930’s. There also sits a good number of books that were donated by friends, who never hesitated on ‘great gift ideas.’ Few books I have inherited from my late father, mostly classics superbly translated into Turkish in between 1940-50, and a few on Ottoman history, his favorite subject as an enthusiast (a lawyer.) Somehow, before he was sixty, he decided to donate almost all his books to a public library in Izmir, possibly in the hundreds. Me and my two older brothers grew up among books at home, but for them as kids (and not for me, somehow) the favorite pastime was reading hefty volumes of encyclopedias from cover to cover in 1960’s, around thirty five years before google search. I still keep some of them.  The popularity of encyclopedias in Turkey (Larousse, Brittanica, etc., translated into Turkish) saw its heyday during the time that they were given away by the newspapers after one collected hundreds of coupons printed on the front page every day. This was the case especially in the 1980s before the advent of multi-channel television, and all those massive volumes, brand new and unread, were later dumped and collected from the streets to be turned into pulp.

There are still a couple of important aspects to be addressed while unpacking my library. First, where does literature/fiction fit in this inventory? Unfortunately, world classics are missing in the curricula of education for an average Turkish adolescent. One has to go after them, and spend a considerable effort in life in order not to stay illiterate on a wide spectrum, from Sophocles to Shakespeare and to the nineteenth century novel. For me, the modern classics had been more approachable in the order of things to read; Italo Calvino, Paul Auster, Saint-Exupery, Georges Perec and Orhan Pamuk are represented with many books, and samples from modern novelists of twentieth century are present, and so are other Turkish writers. I sense that to me ‘the book as object’  still has the semi-sacred aura that possibly contradicts the western readers’ attitude towards paperbacks. The problem is, how does one prescribe himself  the  “1000 books to read before you die…” of the popular parlance? So little time, and little space left on the shelves. Every time I read the news on the shortlisted authors for ‘Booker’ or ‘Pulitzer,’ I feel that I have been somehow missing the real stories.  And secondly, ‘in extensio:’ Why are my books about eighty percent in English? Why read (even when good translations are available) and try to write in English mostly, far from my native Turkish in which I mainly crack my jokes? Am I a self-hating Turk, as in the Zionist take on the ‘self hating Jew’? Or a kind of colonial subject deprived of his roots? I very rarely dream, and only sometimes think in English, and when the time comes I curse and swear bilingually. And whatever I write in English requires editing by a ‘native speaker’ before being respectably published in print. It is a trap I fall into as I compare the mere 15 to 20-thousand-word Turkish dictionaries, to the average 50 thousand words in  Webster’s, or more in a decent sized Roget’s Thesaurus (even in college edition)  as though there are more sophisticated and nuanced ways of telling things. I will leave it at that, convincing myself that if I read in English then I write in the same language, and that possibly more people can read it. But deep down I sense that the really creative writing is done in the tongue that you hear from your mother.

In the well known essay titled “The Total Library,” (2) Borges muses on the theorem of ‘the infinite monkey’, that an ape (or many apes) sitting at a typewriter and randomly hitting the keys for unlimited time have the possibility to eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare (or all the books in the British Museum.) For more than one hundred years, variants of this theorem had been analyzed, tested and, more recently, simulated by using computer(s).  In 2024, it is finally refuted by mathematicians on the grounds that the probability of such an achievement to occur would take longer than the lifespan of our universe, whose ‘heat death’ is assumed to take place in around a ‘googol’ of years, that is 1 followed by one hundred zeros. (3) To the exact contrary, one thinks that for the artificial general intelligence to write all there is in a future total library is fast closing in on the probability of 1/1, in the mathematical limit that the value of a function approaches as the index (computational power-speed?) approaches some value. Indeed this is also pure speculation considering the physical limits (energy and resources needed that would bring an end not to the universe but to the earth as we know it.) More importantly, one wants to (impossibly) believe that the stories of the humankind, as told by humans in a cosmic dream, is more than the sum of its parts in atoms, bits, networks and algorithms.  Borges wrote the essay in 1939, a year before Walter Benjamin climbed up the Pyrenees (late September) fleeing Nazi occupied France to reach Spanish border (Port-Bou) only to be denied entry. The next day he committed suicide. The ordeal of this escape on foot was written down in 1980 by Lisa Fittko, his guide who accompanied him and two others. (4) Her emphasis is on the heavy black briefcase that Benjamin carried and guarded at all costs, apparently containing “… a manuscript  more important than I am” in his words. Years later, Lisa Fittko hears from Gershom Sholem, Benjamin’s closest friend, that “… there is no manuscript, until now nobody knew that such a manuscript ever existed.”  And no entity will ever write it down for us. Now there is a Walter Benjamin Library in Port-Bou, his resting place.

April 2025

1. Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Shocken Books, N.Y. 1969

2. Jorge Luis Borges. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Eliot Weinberger, ed.  Penguin Books, London 1999

3. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/01/infinite-monkey-theorem-keyboard-tyepwriter-shakespeare-study

4. Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Harvard Un. Press, Cambridge 1999