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Now, 18 years later, I was back in Washington in a unique situation. I was a bright and diligent person with an excellent professional background. Yet, after I returned from Saudi Arabia at the end of 1980, I was unemployable. Over the years, I had written about 1,000 job applications for handpicked positions in America, but something, perhaps karma, had blocked even interviews. So much for self- effort. Surely the probability of such an outcome for a person like me in this presumably meritocratic "Land of Opportunity" was very minute. But here I stood, for 14 years. Thanks to the Saudis, to whom my gratitude grew continuously since 1981, I could sit back in the relative comfort of my apartment and muse about karma and effort
Father (Cavit Celayir, born on 7/11/1913 in Arhavi, ages 12 to 21) and Mother Zekiye Sirman (age 21). Top left:
his 1st photo (sitting, age 12 in Arhavi), with cousin Cemil (1925), in Caucasian outfit in Sivas (1932),
in high school in Erzurum, practicing with his violin (1935); Zekiye sent this "flirting" photo to him in 1939.
Free to roam,
my mind wandered to other directions. How would Miyamoto
Musashi's ("Book of 5 Rings") theory of success
function in an arena in which the system denied feedback,
reinforcement, even opportunity and chance to the person, I
wondered. Then it dawned on me that rather than being handicapped
I was elevated. I did not need Musashi, Tony Robbins or the
system. To start with, I had no debts and enough funds from Saudi
Arabia to qualify in the upper 15 percent of America. So I could
experiment, was free to chart my own path, dance to my tune. I
envisioned my dreams as a series of mutually-exclusive sequences
of incarnations. After a hedonistic yet purposeful passage in
California, I started a software business in Washington in 1986.
For seven years, it supported all my expenses and some luxury.
And there were psychic fringe benefits and more cycles to come.
My girlfriend Sharon who had shared my life on and off for the last seven years had left on a two-year duty to a foreign country. I was enjoying my aloneness. We began very attached, but it was from the start a miscegenation between a fundamentalist Christian woman and an ultra Bohemian man. The attachment became sticky like a misplaced bubble-gum. I watched a benign young woman transform to a dyspeptic, peevish, and a pernicious bitch, while her soul plunged into the yawning abysses of space. The transformation happened with me, but I was not the cause.
Sharon grew from an insecure bucolic girl with limited job prospects to a woman who enjoyed a lucrative position with the Federal Government. She did not like the work, but it provided her with more income and status than she could find elsewhere. Saudi Arabia had been my lottery, this was hers. And she was surrounded by dozens of attractive prospects. I was in the middle of the clash between the romantic young girl and the opportunistic woman. One held on to me while the other ranted her vitriol onto me. In view of my programming tasks, sometimes I participated in the drama, other times I was an affable audience. People everywhere regard a marriage or a substantive relationship as an integral part of their happiness. Yet, more often than not, these same bonds eventually become also a major cause of much unhappiness. It seemed to me that in exchange for a short period of magnetism, romance, and shared interests many people endured misery of much longer duration. I contemplated the wisdom of this barter and considered other options.
Pablo Neruda describes the result of the transformation from love to indifference as "we of that time are no longer the same." This jeremiad is usually the voice of addiction that remains in one partner who was less ready for the break. After it was over, I was not sure how to respond to my own inquiry: "was it worth it?" The best answer I could give was something like "much of it was, but a lot of it was not." I thought of her often, but I did not miss her.
The dictionary definitions of "romantic love" do not include the word "addiction," as in "addiction to another person," which anticipates correctly the selfishness inherent in many bonds which people equate to love. Sharon saw her strong attachment to me as an affliction and fought desperately to overcome it. She ballyhooed over a farrago of invented resentments and cowed and snarled ultimatums. Although I did not abuse her, we acted many Fellini-esque scenes. She wanted to be in charge of her destiny, me, our relationship. I gave her freedom when she wanted to be free. She always came back, sometimes hating me and herself for returning. Already after a few months with her I knew this was not "true love," or what supposedly happens when Mr. or Ms. Right is found. However, it was true passion. Love and hate dominated her concomitantly. Our bond ended because I did not quite fit the mold she had in mind of her knight. Sharon was compulsive. She insisted on an exact duplicate. I told her that her cast was faulty. We could not grow so we stagnated until things turned vitriolic and "we of that time" were different.
As I evaluated my imperfect bond with Sharon, I decided that in spite of these imperfections this had been a "true love" experience, perhaps superior to the one endorsed by the society: love in marriage. Sharon was turbulent. I knew after a month or two that marriage was out of question. Her mood fluctuated so abruptly and vehemently that often we could not plan the weekend before us, let alone marriage. On the other hand, our bond had spice, potency, passion, turbulence, variety, obsession, jealousy, misery, elation, and everything else sane and insane people can introduce to a relationship. Our senses were alive; we were alive.
Now it was over. I wanted to sift the variables and then decide if marriage made sense for me, or for anyone else for that matter. Was it essentially an obsolete institution, like the British monarchy? My relationship had ended but also many marriages. Did so many marriages and like relationships fail because people were always imperfect or because marriage promised this outcome for most people? Was transiency the more natural affair than permanence? I did not want to evaluate this simplistically, like a dialectic about preferences between Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle.
I thought of scrutinizing true love from a poetic perspective. Poets felt things deeper than most people and seemed to exaggerate, but they were not dishonest. They would not endorse artificial emotions. Their love was a potent passion that included a romantic beginning and a shattering end, a combination of elation and heartbreak, as if both ingredients had to be present for the experience to qualify as love. The most notable love stories in fiction and movies ended in some sort of tragedy. It was frequently the tragic end that made them memorable, guaranteeing an audience and lasting impression: "Splendor in Grass," "Love Story," "The Way We Were," etc. Even the ultimate American epic story ended (did not continue), as also "Casablanca" and "Lara's Theme." These stories, real or fiction, were transient loves, but every one of them had been true love; millions of people around the world confirmed this repeatedly.
This meant the reality and illusion of love I shared with Sharon, Suzette, Janice, Jules, Elizabeth, Barbara, Gayle, Judith, Janet, Rita and others of lesser duration were nothing less than round-trip poetic journeys. I had found true love not once but often. However, somehow these "loves" did not quite fit the ethereal cast of true love endorsed by the society, exemplified by the Nelsons, "Father Knows Best," Lucy and Desi, "Bewitched," "The Brady Bunch." It seemed that unless love led to marriage and included formal declarations of "forever," "in sickness," children, etc., it did not qualify as "true love." This bundle was still not complete unless it received official sanction, usually by a stranger. Surely poets could not have concocted this definition of love.
True love, as endorsed by the society, was essentially an idea invented by social engineers and buttressed by the clergy to achieve stability and a grand objective. All major religions equated love to sin, if the former deviated from the one in their design. And they could force people to "suffer" love. Sometimes the suffering reached grotesque levels. Those who were found guilty of forbidden love were stoned to death in some places. The men of some societies found other ways of protecting their fragile egos. They circumcised women while they were still babies. The Catholic church did not allow divorce or abortion, as if unmarried men who presumably never touched a woman since their breast-feeding days and never raised families could judge such matters. Yet millions of women adhered to their directives or sinned, instead of excommunicating their priests. While scientists spoke about impending climate changes, overcrowding, starvation, and worldwide triage, these men, joined by Muslim and Jewish men, shifted from reality to its idiom and spoke of a world that could feed an infinite number of children. Perhaps people needed a doomsday to come to their senses and start "kicking butt." The schemers who defined love in these corrupt ways had to be men.
I tried to reconcile love and love in marriage in other ways. How many fights and separations were allowed? If change was the companion of growth, things people expected to find with, in, and through another person also changed. For some, this eventually could mean a different partner. Problems surfaced when one partner was ready for the change and the other was not, which was usually the situation when marriages and relationships broke up, or when either partner resisted the call to avoid hassles. The latter situation led to some sort of compromise and required periodic appraisal of the relationship. In time, it could be crueler than a permanent breakup, for then ennui, frustration, adultery, affairs, separations, abuse, neglect, child abuse, alcoholism, violence, and other symptoms entered the scene.
Many of the less-than-fifty-percent of marriages that seemingly survived did so by enduring a combination of these manifestations. These symptoms continued for years or even for the duration. For these couples, the institution of marriage hardly qualified even for the dubious praise given to democracy. Yet, in spite of all these realities and although the definition of true love was not clear, people were told to find love in marriage. Relationships without license would have ended in most of these situations. Marriages continued, in part due to barriers to divorce and partly because marriages promoted dependencies, habits, and responsibilities beyond those found in relationships.
Love, true or passing, added a great deal but it had also the potential to subtract a lot. In view of the odds, confining true love to marriage did not seem to make sense. What was it that people insisted on finding? True love, as defined in context to marriage, required unconditional love and total commitment from both partners. Although people generally believed they had these potentials in them, they had them perhaps only under utopian conditions. Obviously everyone did not have them. An individual alone could not plan or prepare for this state. Two people with this potential already in them had to cross paths first. Then both partners had to pray periodically that external forces did not interfere too severely. Even then, there was no way of deciding beforehand "this is it." The success became evident only in the end and in retrospect.
So even when the ingredients were presumably there, true love in marriage was as chancy as winning the lottery. But unlike lottery it demanded a huge investment. People in business probably would not assume such risks in business, although obviously they did, and with some success, in their personal lives. The analogy to the lottery had interesting ramifications. Everyone did not win the lottery. Did the few marriages that survive happily to the end succeed due to effort alone or primarily by sheer luck? Lottery winners did not ridicule people who also tried. However, married people tended to patronize others who did not succeed. Did the people who tried and failed have a reason to feel shame?
It could be that true love was not a packaged ingredient at the start but something that evolved from commitment, trust, loyalty, etc. Perhaps. But a few personality traits had to be present at the start. Like talent in mathematics, some people had these ingredients, others had less of them, and some did not. Since people were not clearly labeled, only experimentation could provide empirical evidence of their true personality, alone and in context to a particular companion. Moreover, many writers, musicians, and other creative people suffered from manic depression and this was said to be the source of their creativity. Perhaps some people required a little turbulence and variety for their happiness and creativity. I tried to imagine Dan Quayle dictating "family values" to Picasso--and Picasso's response.
And many second and third marriages among older people had nothing to do with family values. This was a way for them to escape loneliness and find companions. Yet their numbers were included in support of "family," as also people like Elizabeth Taylor and Femsi and her second husband. If these types of "companionship" marriages were also discounted, how many marriages remained to support family values? And how many of these continued because both partners and the children were happy and flourishing?
Even the marriage ceremony did not make sense. I watched the wedding of Charles and Diane on TV and thought wonderful weddings should be left to Hollywood and people should marry in real life. And there were no divorce ceremonies, only red tape. Marriage and divorce both marked the beginning of an important phase in one's life. It did not seem fair to favor one over the other. I thought that at least the family and close friends should get together and mark divorce with as much happiness as they did the wedding. People insisted on living their lives according to congenital biases and illusions. My first marriage took place in front of a minister and a dozen friends. A justice of peace, two witnesses, and we participated in the second one. It bombed too. So did Femsi's marriage, after 27 years. Her marriage began with a large shindig at the Tradewind Hotel in Niagara Falls.
It seemed that large wedding ceremonies confirmed the illusion that the sum invested in ceremony represented the investment in the marriage. Apparently people made such ludicrous connections. Or people thought they were marking the occasion in a memorable way. Perhaps Charles and Diane had thought this too. (Surely their ceremony will be forever remembered.) For them, the British people paid the bill. In most weddings, the parents paid the bill. I could see how this occasion could qualify as memorable. Families spent substantial sums on artificial clothes and to hire a minister, photographer, jockey, florist, dress maker, caterer, and hotel, hotel rooms, etc. to impress, feed, and entertain many guests half of whom they did not know. And they would probably not see most of the other half ever again. Since people did not commit such idiocy normally, the ceremony qualified as memorable.
Perhaps they thought that a church, minister, flowers, and wonderful music made the occasion into a holy event that had God as a witness and sponsor, though God had not endorsed the story-book ceremony of Charles and Diane. The presents could have been purchased from the money spent for the ceremony and small and tasteful party could have substituted for the shindig. This would have still left a significant amount that could have been invested for a variety of meaningful purposes. To be sure, the outcome of most of these arrangements rendered these ceremonies a joke. It seemed to me that the only time a marriage deserved a ceremony was at the end, 40 or more years later. Karma and self-effort, as always, would decide the outcome.
I participated in more than a dozen weddings. In retrospect, only a few of them were memorable. One wedding took place in Arhavi, in 1953. My sisters and I were children then. We drove a day to get there. Only about fifty immediate clan members attended. The wedding was simple, warm, sincere, and entertaining. My sister Gülhis' wedding was nice too. It took place at our home in Waynesburg, PA in 1972. Only the immediate family and a few friends attended. The ceremony was marked by simplicity, warmth, quaintness, dignity, and not money: very fitting for two real artists. It has survived for 24 years. Another occasion was a simple small town church wedding that involved Naim, my Palestinian student and friend from Salem College, and Barbara, his young "gold mine" American wife, in Buckhannon, WV in 1975. I visited them and their four all- American kids in Navarre, FL 20 years later.
In pioneer days, which includes the time when Father and Mother married in Turkey, couples were expected to be together forever, despite hardships and differences. They did not rely on psychologists, counselors, ministers, astrologers, or psychics. Many succeeded by will, effort, and a sense of joint purpose. Whether they found happiness depends on how happiness is defined. Today people were free to emphasize the happiness ingredient, including many hedonistic and transient components. When problems surfaced, many found it more expedient to switch mates. This rejuvenated them, at least for a time.
These trends were probably more pronounced in America, also because individual rights--in contrast to social rights--proudly flourished as the paramount right in this country. Americans were conditioned to equate individual rights also to expediency. So even if the Religious Right came to power and drafted new standards, Americans would continue to live their lives expediently: happily married couples would remain married, and unhappy couples who did not have to stay together would eventually divorce, regardless of the conservative or liberal milieu. Therefore, it did not seem plausible that a redundant crusade like "family values" could make a dent: it was a superfluous message for happy marriages, an irrelevant one for unhappy marriages. And people with adventurous genes would continue to disregard such crusades. Very practical.
It could be that "family values" was nothing more than a nostalgic outcry. The Christian Right and its Trojan entourage bemoaned the present and were trying to recapture the glory days of the 1950s, or at least the imagined eminence of the 1980s. They could not bring themselves to gainsay that the opus of the 1950s was gone forever and the 1980s could be reached perhaps once more, even if their choristers ruled the government. Apparently only the Concord Coalition and a few others anticipated the next anomaly in the channel of American destiny, say by 2015.
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