“The Disturbed Tree – 2003”

About the original poem and the poet : First published in 1946, The Disturbed Tree is
the name of both a book and a poem by Melih Cevdet Anday (1915-2002), who was among
the three founders of Garip (“Strange”) movement which revolutionized modern Turkish
poetry in 1940’s. (The Garip movement eliminated not only rigid forms and meters but also
metaphors, rhymes, conventional diction and stock epithets. Soon free verse and an unlimited
range of themes became the rule, while “aruz” meter and “the rose and the nightingale”
became anachronisms - http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1534.html).

Based on a lover-poet’s jealousy about a tranquil and indifferent tree, Melih

Cevdet’s poem is as clear as this (I hope God will forgive me even if I made the translation) :

“Near the Etlik gardens

There is a tree I know
He never heard of happiness
Thus was God’s law

He knows the night and the day

And the four seasons, the wind, the snow
Enjoys the moonlight as well, as he
Of darkness does not complain

To really mean to disturb him

I’ll hand him a book
And if he’d ever fall in love
Come and have a look”

About the work “The Disturbed Tree - 2003” :

Since we humans disturbed (!) the trees and plundered the nature far more than Melih
Cevdet could ever guess in 1946, I felt guilty and I wanted to give a present to that tree, and
also to the poet who obviously respected and admired the nature’s beauty. Following the
death of the poet, I began to think more about the nature (tree), the subject (poet), the product
(book) and the relations among these three (poetry, publishing, digital media, digitalization).
The result is “The Disturbed Tree – 2003” work, which simulates a –virtual- tree growing on
the ground of a web site, with its disturbing branches (pop-up windows) taking revenge.
Since digital media rescues the trees from being cut down for paper, this could be seen as a
celebration too. Continuing to its ironic demonstration, the tree digitally disturbs Melih
Cevdet’s poem in each opening pop-up a little more, and finally manifests its own will with
the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene : Noli me tangere (“Touch me not”)! Through
its randomly opening pop-ups (that is its branches, its hands), the tree derives many variations
of the poem (visualized, sampled, Gödelized, digitalized, randomized, mixed, censored,
cybernetic, noisy etc) of the poet who wanted to see itself disturbed. So the tree which was
once disturbed of receiving a book by the poet, disturbs the poet by handing him a digital
mirror now.

The work needs pop-up windows to be allowed and is activated through two
sequential links. In the first page, there is put what is truly said to me by my girlfriend that

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time, while I was working on the project – “Don’t do it, this is a beautiful poem”! When you
click on the words “a beautiful poem”, you get the original poem opened in a centered pop-
up. And when you click the “have a look” part of the last verse, you see the tree you‘ve
disturbed popping up in random places. Short info about the contents of all pop-ups (in
reverse opening order) :

(i) Visual tree : This is a tree-shaped visual/concrete poem, a carmina figurata,

derived from the words of the original poem. If you follow the bold letters from up to down,
you read “No timbre there, just a radiant tree”. So a “poem within the poem within the poem”
is created.

(ii) Cloned tree : The visual tree (see above) is put beside the left half of its clone and
that way a new poem is achieved via interference. This one is visually imitating a grove
applying the biological cell-cloning process to an embodied poem.

(iii) Zipped tree : Now this is the compressed version of (i) which recalls digital data
zipping techniques used for transmission of the bytes across the network.

(iv) Alpha filtered tree : Visual tree alpha-filtered with low opacity. Now, only the
“No timbre there, just a radiant tree” part is readable.

(v) Censored tree : Referencing the fact of art censorship throughout the history, the
original poem is censored. Since there seems no reason to censor such a beautiful poem,
words like “bear”, “beer”, “dog”, “God”, “sucks” , “cunt” are detected in a far too paranoid
manner, and censored. A sarcastic way to demonstrate the absurdity of censorship.

(vi) Sampled tree : Sampling is the first step of digitalization of an analog signal. The
original poem is sampled in its half (1/2) frequency and the meaning is lost.

(vii) Semantically sampled tree : Preserving the meaning while sampling - this was a
tough problem to solve! Some words obtained were semi- (or multi-) significant.

(viii) Binary tree : Once sampled, our tree-poem is ready for digital representation.
The ASCII values of sampled characters were just a convenient encoding scheme among
many others.

(ix) Hexadecimal tree : This is the hexadecimal version of (viii). 16 is the most used
base in computer science when a short representation of binary values is needed, as it is the
case with memory addresses.

(x) Gödelized tree : Gödelization is another - rather complex - encoding technique

named after the mathematician Kurt Gödel who invented it. In order to achieve a Gödel
number for each line of the poem, each distinct word in the poem is assigned an unique
number. Then if line L1 contains the numbers (=words) W1, W2 and W3 in left to right
order, the Gödel number G1 for L1 is simply calculated as G1 = 2 W1 x 3W2 x 5W3 . Note that
we select the Nth prime number as the base for exponent WN. This procedure is repeated till all
lines are processed.

(xi) Noisy tree : This is the version we get after a simple semantic noise filter has been
applied to the original poem. In every fifth character the string “zzz” is inserted.

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 (xii) Tree-poem genetically crossed with another poem : The original poem is
“genetically” crossed with another poem (Behcet Necatigil’s A Faded Rose When Touched).
So the new poem gets the title A Disturbed Tree When Touched, and the poet’s name Melih
Cevdet Necatigil. The applied crossing process which awsome changes the semantics of the
poem is as simple as taking the odd numbered lines from Melih Cevdet’s The Disturbed Tree,
and the even numbered ones from Necatigil’s A Faded Rose When Touched since the two fit
each other like puzzle pieces.

(xiii) Mutant tree : If we take a further step towards biological effects, we surely find
the concept of genetic mutation. Imagine that for some reason the letters – the cells - have
been changed slightly by mutation, but the poem – the body – is still meaningful because it
has to adapt itself to the changing environment – and this is what is done in the Mutant Tree
window.

(xiv) Randomized tree : Mutant tree reminds us of the importance of random changes.
What is the chance of getting something significant after randomizing the order of the words
within a poem? Randomized Tree is just an experiment made to get an idea about the answer.

(xv) Arranged tree : Considering the question above (see xiv) , arranged tree probably
proves that the human intelligence is superior to the artificial one. I wonder when machines
will be able to solve such poetic problems, if they ever will be. Because being in some order
doesn’t imply to be in harmony.

(xvi) Programmed tree : Now we give the machine a chance to create the original
poem as a program’s output – which we might consider to be a kind of poetry. First we
develope an object-oriented model of the universe of the poem and then let the objects (the
poet, the tree, the book etc) have some attributes and talk to each other via their methods. I
highly encourage you to try the same too, because it’s not just entertaining, but also inspiring.

(xvii) Cybernetic tree : Now this is a block diagram of an automatic control system
for the learning process of the tree. Acting as the controller, the poet will give as many books
as needed to the system (the tree) till it gets the desired info about love. For this reason, the
degree of it’s disturbance will be continuously measured in the laboratory by the secretion of
its stress-related hormons, and will be fed back to the poet. (Assumption: The more the tree
learns about love, the more it gets stressed).

(xviii) Protest tree : In the end of this ironic demonstration, the tree manifests its own
will with the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene : Noli me tangere (“Touch me not”)!
As Elias Canetti wrote in his Crowds and Power (1960), the fear of being touched
(aphenphosmphobia or haphephobia) belongs to the burglars themselves.

Özcan Türkmen, 24/02/2007, Istanbul