Radio Jeddah

FAREWELL
“Writing for Pleasure”

by
Aydın Nurhan
April 2004

My Dear Listeners,
Today is our day for a farewell.

We have been together, on and off the air, since more than a year now.
As it is time to say good-bye, this week I chose a special topic for you.
Today I want to talk to you on “writing for pleasure”.
As you may remember, long time ago I had talked to you about pleasure
reading.
And now I want to tell you about writing for pleasure.
In my farewell speech, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you on
how one evolves into being a journalist, how journalists contemplate and put
their ideas on paper and microphone.
My dear friends,
As you all know, we write for different reasons and occasions.
Most people write because they have to. We can call that compulsory
writing.
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We may have to write to earn our bread, or write as a social duty to family
or friends.
And on the other side, we may write for personal pleasure, or psychological
relief.
Now, we know many professional writers and artists who create for
earning a living. The need for decent living and earning money, does force an
artist to produce and be creative. Or else he may get lazy and lose creativity.
So money is indeed an incentive in itself for creativity.
Still yet, I believe that art is for people who do not need to earn a living.
But even rich artists need stress and incentive.
They also need an internal discipline, and an education process of
reflection and contemplation.
We can call this internal discipline positive stress.
As both compulsory and pleasure creativity may lead to masterpieces of
art, still yet, I think the best art is art for pleasure. In art for money, there are
time constraints which restrict the artist from the final touches to his creation.
Whereas in leasure, pleasure writing, the artist has all the time he needs to
elaborate for reaching perfection.
Now, after this lengthy introduction,
I would like to tell you how a career diplomat has turned into a journalist
and a radio programmer, a story especially for our youth, who may one day be
interested in pleasure writing.
To start with, let me correct a wrong image of career diplomats among
the world community. Many a people portray us diplomats as high society
in perpetual vanity. Yet, apart from exceptions, diplomats have decent, quiet
family lives, and if they can find time away from endless official receptions
they have to attend, they love to be home with their children.
They value their families more than many other professionals, because
diplomats are lonely people. Diplomats are like migrating birds. They are
lonely birds separated from their villages, hometowns, family and friends.
These lone birds try to make new friends in every now post, then after
a few years, again they are on the move. And in time, in a fatalistic spirit,
they start accepting and liking loneliness, forced upon them by their very
profession.
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And this feeling of loneliness also passes on to their children.
And for this very reason, my dear listeners, diplomats find friends in
books.
The more they read, the more their minds get loaded, and one day comes,
as Rumi has said, “fill up, so you can pour out”, they need to discharge their
laments, joys and their knowledge, on white paper. Yet, many of them have to
wait for retirement to do so.
But rarely, some diplomats get a chance to take time out from their offices,
and if they want, they can use it for reflecting their ideas to the society. And I
am one of those few lucky who had that chance.
How did I start writing?
First, I started writing my memoirs. I started putting my happiness, my
sorrows, hopes and despairs on white paper. White pages became my friends,
my psychiatrist, my confidantes, especially when I felt lonely.
After some time, I started commenting on daily events and my daily
personal experiences.
Then I transferred interesting ideas from the books I read, and started
commenting on them, not to show them to anyone, but just for my own
intellectual exercise.
In this story, I want to emphasize one point for beginners, and that is, I
never paid attention to the mistakes I made. I mean I had the absolute freedom
to make mistakes. I did not care if my sentences were correct or not. I wrote
just as natural as it poured out of my mind.
And I wrote if I wanted, I quit, if I did not feel the need to write.
I was not accountable, I did not have any responsibility to anyone I wrote
without restriction of ideas or time.
Yet as time went by, I figured out that I have developed a style, moreover,
reading and writing has started correcting my sentences.
And one day, I sent a thesis of mine on Turkish Culture, to one famous
Turkish poet/thinker, Attila Ilhan. He first published my thesis in his newspaper
column, then in his book on Turkish Culture. He also encouraged me to develop
my thesis and write a book on it.
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See, my friends?
How events develop as you start reading and writing?
Then I wrote a short book on Turkish Culture, and many intellectuals and
politicians in Turkey read it.
Then, as I was Deputy Consul General in Chicago, one friend who came
to visit us, read by book, and offered me a column in his economical newspaper
in Turkey. So I took my first step into journalism, and started sending weekly
articles from Chicago under a pseudonym. In this deal, I gained experience,
and the newspaper gained money.
And then came the agreement between the Islamic Conference
Organization and Jeddah Radio for the OIC Directors to make radio programs,
and I grasped the opportunity once again…
This is the story of a radio programmer…
My Dear Friends..
I think you already understood why I took so much of your time telling
my story to you.
I wanted to give, especially to our young listeners the phases a writer
passes through in his intellectual evolution.
Now, to professional journalism..
In newspaper business, space is restricted, so you are regularly warned on
writing short articles. I did not get such warnings, because I do not like to build
fancy, long sentences, neither have I the ability to do so.
As our forefathers have said, “put everything necessary, nothing
unnecessary”, I try to set things in shortest possible manner, and keep out
unnecessary rhetoric and details outside my essays.
Whereas in radio speeches, exactly the opposite is expected of you.
For instance, in Turkish Section, we were expected to talk for nearly twenty
minutes, in English section a bit shorter. As professionals of this business
know, a 20 minute radio speech is a 6 to 8 page thesis, a little conference. And
for an intellectual to write such a thesis is a responsible and serious duty.
In fact, newspaper journalism and radio broadcasting have both hardships
of their own. This also depends on the personality of the journalist. For
instance, if you like to write short, substantial, compact ideas, then newspaper
columnism would suit you best.
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But if you come especially from the culture of literature reading, then you
can embellish your speeches with beautiful literature and adjectives, and write
pages and pages, just for the sake of its artistic value.
Yes my dear listeners,
As we continue our chat on writing in this farewell speech of mine, let
us think of a journalist who has stopped writing for sometime. He uses his
time for reading, reflection, and contemplation. And then the fresh new ideas,
elaborated over and over and matured in the brain, spill so smooth and natural
to the community.
Yet, by time, the originality fades away, new ideas diminish, and the
journalist starts forcing his brain to create new ideas just to keep on writing.
Now, if he has the intellectual ethic and integrity, the most he can do after
bankrupting originality, he goes to archives and encyclopaedias and write
informative articles. Yet these articles would be tasteless and without spirit.
They do not reflect ideas that were well contemplated and matured, more,
turned into a thesis. They are crude ideas, not thought over, not matured, just
enforced on paper to get away with business.
Shortly, they are not messages, passionate explosions of the mind that you
cannot stop from overflowing to the society.
Theses are intellectual orgasms, unstoppable, we exhale from our spirits
unto the community. These ideas explode unto paper in such way that once you
exhale them, you feel like a mother who has given birth to a new baby. And it
is a bliss.
And this unstoppable passion of the intellectual, after giving fantastic
bliss, can create serious problems for himself, as in illegal relation.
And my dear listeners,
Writing for pleasure is this kind of pouring out of pasion from the mind
of the intellectual.
At this point, I would recall the movie “Amadeus” with seven Oscars
which is about the life of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In the movie, Mozart undertakes to write an opera with a certain deadline.
Time goes by, but there is no preparation, no notes on paper. As deadline
approaches, the patrons knock Mozart’s door, and want to see preparations. At
that moment, Mozart shows his head with his index finger saying “here”.
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Yes, in fact, the notes have been shaping in Mozart’s mind, and matured
to pour out on paper. A grand opera has formed in the mind of the genious, and
after that, writing of the opera takes a short time for him.
With this example, what I want to convey to you is that, an idea or an
artistic concept first drops to the mind as a seed, then blossoms, matures, and
as the fruit falls from the branch of a tree, falls from the mind unto paper as an
article, a poem or picture, or musical notes.
And once delivered, the pain of maternal delivering ends.
These examples are for ideal art, for pleasure.
Yet life is much different than this.
Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have to write to earn their bread.
In many countries, newspaper columnists have a compulsory duty to find a
topic for every single day to write about.
In reality, not one brain can create an original idea for every 24 hours.
How can a passionate idea, to be spilled into the community build every 24
hours in a mind?
What happens then, is writing for bread, for ordinary artisanship.
This is why, in Western world, many columnists do not write daily columns.
The ones who write every day are real top brains. I read them continually, even
they cannot be original every day.
Same attitude goes for university professors. If academics do not renew
themselves in time, they become monotonous like highschool teachers who
teach from the books ordered upon them.
This is why the Western universities have established a good tradition
called “Sabbatics” which gives professors time for refreshment.
In this system, a professor can go to another university to live alone, and
do research on what he wants, away from daily teaching hurdles. He is given a
secretary and uses libraries and resources, contemplates, reflects, refreshes his
knowledge, and after a year, is born again with fresh ideas.
Journalism is similar in nature. One reads for long time, produces new
ideas, then for a year or two, he presents his ideas to the society, then, when
the ideas that sprout from his spirit into the society finish, then he starts acting
as a merchant.
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At such point, one feels the need to stop writing, start reading, and develop
fresh, original ideas.
Yet the life is real, journalists have to earn their living, neither them, nor
their papers can afford such luxury. This is perhaps one reason why articles
in our papers do not come to a certain clout and originality in international
intellectual fora.
Yes, my dear friends,
It is time for me too, to have sabbatics, an intellectual vacation for
reflection and contemplation.
I discharged my ideas that had built in my mind through years, shared
them with you, always keeping in my mind that I was serving my ummah, I
had to say good for my ummah, say good for humanity, for the future of our
innocent children.
I do not have any more to say now, It is time to fill again.
As I bid you farewell, let me pay a duty of mine, a duty of gratitude.
The Saudi Arabian Radio entrusted its microphones to a brotherly Turkish
Diplomat. My speeches were not censured, and I had full freedom of the topic
to choose, full freedom of context to say.
My honourable response was to write with utmost honesty, with the
responsibilty of a muslim Turkish diplomat, who had taken an oath to work for
his ummah, and the mission to strenthen sentiments and solidarity among our
brotherly OIC countries.
Last but not least, I thank Mr. Omar, Director General of Jeddah Radio, Ms.
Hanan, Head of International Broadcasting Section, her assistant Mrs. Samar
Fatany, and our beloved studio engineers for their continual encouragement
and support for me.
And above all, I thank you my dear listeners, brothers and sisters for being
with us for since some time.
May Allah bless you, and humanity for ever.
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