Nuri was unable to restrain himself, “What do you mean by ‘explicit’? The situation strikes me as being so baffling that – ”
“On one hand we’re for better or worse attempting to appropriate a certain technique, to become people of a contemporary mind-set. As we adopt that mentality, by dint of circumstance, we have to discard traditional values. We’re exchanging models of social relations. On the other hand we don’t want to forget the past! What role does this past play within our present-day realities? Apparently, it’s only reminiscence or a nostalgia of sorts for us . . . It might ornament our lives! But what other constructive value could it possibly have?”
By ‘explicit,’ what do I mean? he thought. Then he raised his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Besides, if I knew what should be done, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, my friend. I’d go down to the heart of the city and gather everyone around me. I’d shout like Yunus Emre, ‘I’ve come bearing your reality for you.’ This isn’t a matter that can be resolved by the first person who contemplates it. But, here as well, we can find a few things that need immediate attention. First, bring everybody together. So be it if the standard of living among them varies, it’s enough that they feel the urge for the same New Life . . . Suffice it that one group isn’t the mangled remnant of traditional culture and the other newly settled tenants of the modern world. We need a synthesis of both.
“Second, we need to establish a new relationship to our past. The former is relatively easy, we can achieve it by more or less transforming material conditions. But the latter can only be achieved through cooperation between generations.
“If we neglect the past, it’ll jut into us like a foreign object throughout our lives. Like it or not we have to make it part of the grand synthesis. It’s the source from which we must emerge. We need this notion of continuity even if it’s an illusion. Not to mention that we weren’t born just yesterday. The past constitutes our starkest reality. Now then, onto which of these roots do we make our graft? The folk and folk life are at times a treasure trove, at times a mirage. From a distance it appears like a limitless expanse. But on closer scrutiny, you’re limited to five or ten motifs and modes; or you’ll enter straightaway into fixed life forms. As for Ottoman classical or elite culture, we’ve broken free of that in many respects ... and anyway, the civilization to which it was bound has been destroyed.”
Mümtaz said, “This is precisely what I see as the impasse; because, as you’ve said, the past has no legs upon which to stand. Today in Turkey we wouldn’t be able to name five books that consecutive generations read together. Except in rare instances, those who take any pleasure in older authors are increasingly fewer in number. We’re seemingly the last link. Soon poets like Nedim or Nef’î, or even traditional music, which is ever so appealing to us, will join a category of things from which we’ve been estranged!”
“There are obstacles. But it’s not an impasse. We’re currently living through reactionary times. We despise ourselves. Our heads are full of comparisons and contrasts: We don’t appreciate Dede because he’s no Wagner; Yunus Emre, because we haven’t been able to cast him as a Verlaine; or Bâkî, because he can’t be a Goethe or a Gide. Despite being the most well-appointed country nestled amid the opulence of immeasurable Asia, we’re living naked and exposed. Geography, culture, and all the rest expect a new synthesis from us, and we’re not even aware of our historic mission. Instead, we’re trying to relive the experiences of other countries.
“You know about the practice of exegesis, right, tefsir? Weighing and considering a text to absorb it as part of one’s human experience? If only we could initiate that. That’s what we haven’t been able to do. I just now used the word ‘appreciate,’ but it’s not enough to ‘appreciate,’ either; we need to go beyond that. We don’t know how to experience ideas and emotions like living, breathing things. Meanwhile, this is what our fellow citizens want.”
Orhan, incredulous: “Do they really? It seems to me that our citizens have been indifferent from the get-go. Throughout history they’ve remained at such a remove from us that . . . they’re practically helpless in this regard; or at the very least harbor suspicions.”
“Yes, our people do want this. If we stopped looking at history through the lens of today’s grievances, you’d think this country was like any other. The distinguishing factor is the lack of a middle-class here. Developments were always pregnant with the possibility of its formation, but it didn’t occur. The point of divergence begins with this fact. The indifference or suspicion of the people is nothing but a fable that we’ve concocted. Nothing but a rhetorical tactic we’ve seized upon to pin our opponents in ideological skirmishes. You know what I mean; those fleeting Pyrrhic victories that glimmer for an instant only in a reader’s mind or that simply remain confined to the editorial pages of a skimmed newspaper? Victories of that sort! In fact, our city dwellers and villagers do confide in intellectuals and do heed them. What other recourse is there? Two centuries of political upheaval has forced us to live in a sort of battle formation. Threats of absolute certainty gave rise to such protocol. Our citizens have always confided in intellectuals and have walked the paths they’ve blazed.”
“And they’ve always been misled, haven’t they?”
“No, or more precisely, when we’ve been misled, so have they. I mean, as is the case in every nation. Do you really think there’s something like rational progress in history? That’s beyond the realm of possibility. But the cumulative strength of the society transcends the missteps of a single generation. It gives us the illusion that everything’s progressing apace. Rest assured that we’ve been misled and have made as many mistakes as any other nation.”
“Do you even like the ordinary folk of this country?”
“Everybody who admires life has affection for the folk . . .”
“For life or the folk? It seems to me that you admire life or the concept of it more, isn’t that so?”
“The folk themselves constitute life. They’re both its human landscape and its singular source. I both admire and savor the people. Sometimes they’re as beautiful as an idea, sometimes as crude as nature. With them, all things are writ large. More often than not, they’ll fall as silent as vast seas. But when they find the tongue with which to speak ...”
“But to approach them – you aren’t able to approach them! Their miseries, agonies, anxieties, and even pleasures remain closed to you. I mean to say closed to us all. When I worked in Adana, I felt this quite tangibly. I always remained at the door.”
“Who knows? Certain doors appear closed because we aren’t before them but behind them. All comprehensive things are this way. When you try to confine it to a formula, it recedes. You descend into trivial miseries. One moment you’ll be stuck in reason, logic, cynicism, and denial, and in the next you’ll be overcome by impossibility, incapability, and revolt . . . Meanwhile, if you seek it within yourself, you’ll discover it. This is a matter of discipline, or even of method.”
“Okay, but how will we find it? It’s so confounding . . . At times I feel confined to a glass container like Goethe’s Homunculus.”
İhsan, musing: “Don’t suppose I’ll answer by advising, ‘Break out of your shell!’ In that case, you’ll just dissipate! Whatever you do, don’t break your shell! Expand it and make it part of yourself, refine and rejuvenate it with lifeblood. Make your shell part of your skin.” He suspected he might be playing rhetorical games to avoid being cornered by his former students, but no, these were his genuine thoughts. The individual ought to preserve itself. Nobody had the right to dissolve into Creation. Individuals should remain as individuals, but they ought to fill themselves with experience. He added: “The error of the Homunculus was that he didn’t turn his protective vessel into a living organism, he didn’t unite with all of Creation from that surface; in other words, his mistake was being unable to coexist fully. The problem wasn’t the shell per se.”
“But you’ve misunderstood me,
sir. You haven’t been able to achieve that state of mind either! Had you, you wouldn’t be seeking or trying to foster it within yourself. You’d be regarding it as reality imposing itself upon you and the setting, like a collection of values and truths. You wouldn’t be attempting to discover it like a truth belonging to you alone. I don’t buy it. In a sense you’re the one who’s fabricating, whereas I’m talking about approaching what already exists.”
İhsan looked at Orhan’s face compassionately before saying, “I’m not sure what good such talk does. But I’d like to be more explicit. I understand your doubts. You want me to forgo myself, to deny myself. You see affection as a voluntary matter. In this respect, it’s dissatisfying. Your advice is to:Toss your heart to the vortex and venture out as the soul of vastness
“Or else you’re confronting me with the people and folklife as a single reality or obligation. You think the same way about yourself, and it pains you because you can’t actualize it. But you’re overlooking one point, namely, that before all else you constitute an autonomous self. Above all I aspire to be faithful to myself. This comprises my spiritual integrity. Only after I’ve attained that might I be of any use to others. Being faithful to myself, that is, adopting certain ethics, is what has separated me from my surroundings from the beginning. Necessarily I’d slip away from ordinary people. After finding myself at this extreme, I’d return to them again. That’s why I’d admire them and, as you say, nurture them in my being. To enter into a mystical trance state or to lose myself in the ‘oceanic’ would serve no purpose for me or my surroundings.
“This means that I perceive life through the frameworks that I want to preserve. These frameworks are my self and my historical persona. I’m a cultural nationalist. I’m a person whose reality reflects a guiding principle. But this doesn’t mean that I’m estranged from the folk; on the contrary, I’m at their command.”
“But you can’t see their suffering, can you?”
“I can. But that’s not my locus of intervention. I know that as long as I see them as being wronged, I’ll only lay the groundwork for their eventual cruelty. Why do we endure such suffering, I mean, the world at large? Because every struggle for the sake of liberty gives rise to new orders of injustice. I want to end tit-for-tat retaliations with the same weaponry. I want to begin the struggle from the very vessel within which we’ve been kneaded and formed. I’m about Turkey. Turkey is my lens, my measure, and my reality. I want to perceive Creation, Humanity, and everything else from there, from that vantage point.”
“That’s not enough!”
“It’s enough to avoid the pitfall of utopia. And it’s even enough for those who want to do something positive.”
“Okay then, go ahead and define the ‘Turkey’ about which you speak.”
İhsan sighed. “That’s the crux of the matter. Locating that ...”
“At times I verge on answering this very question. I tell myself that we’re a nation of displacement and exile. A nation that’s been formed and socialized by distances. By the love, suffering, and liberty of distances. Our history and art, at least among the folk, is this way.” Mümtaz paused to think. “And even our classical musiki.”Were there a sacred campaign that I might join Were I to sink into sands on a pilgrimage to the Kaabe
Nuran had been listening to İhsan’s ideas for the first time, surprised to learn that he was this bound to real circumstances: “The cerebral way that you regard society, as if preparing a synthetic concoction . . .”
And she repeated to herself phrases that she recollected from Yaşar’s vitamin prospectuses: “Vitamin B cannot be readily extracted from foods in which it naturally occurs. As a result of great scientific endeavors, our laboratory has consequently . . .”
“Generations that are obligated to take a formative role can’t look upon life any other way. We’re forced to work, to prepare the foundations for labor, and even to make others do so.”
“But some thinkers claim the contrary, that work dehumanizes people and dims their horizons.”
“Those same thinkers espouse a number of things before coming round to that point. They’re chasing a kind of mysticism within established Europe. They want the opportunity to meditate on the soul . . . First I desire the formation of my soul and organization of my material being. What they desire constitutes the essence of any mystical sect. But the social life of a nation is not that of a sect . . . and that comes from someone like me with collective leanings. Were I in France, I’d also focus on the individual, contemplating how it might thrive despite society. Or this, or that other thing . . . I’d be dissatisfied with the status quo and try to address the deficiencies I’d discovered, and I’d struggle for that newfound cause. In Turkey, now, I’m contemplating what’s in the interest of Turkey.”
“A minute ago you said you wouldn’t abandon your personality or your individuality, whereas now . . .”
“Why should I abandon my individuality? And moreover, why shouldn’t I possess personality? The individual is a fact of existence.” In the indeterminacy of reluctance İhsan added, “Just the way trees are the foundation of a forest.”
III
There came another knock at the door. Mümtaz said, “That’s Emin for certain,” and darted from his chair. Most of the others rushed behind him. As Nuran passed before her uncle, who rose from his armchair, she smiled. She knew that he hadn’t seen Emin Dede for years. A few days ago he was ecstatic, exclaiming, “If we winter in Istanbul, I’ll go visit him frequently ...”
Artist Cemil held two neys wrapped in cloth cases in one hand, and helped Emin Dede out of the automobile with the other.
Emin, extending his hand to İhsan, inquired, “Has Tevfik come as well?” He’d been longtime friends with both. He’d first met Tevfik at the Yenikapı Mevlevî dervish lodge during his early youth. Cemil, who played a longnecked tanbur-lute, had introduced İhsan to Emin during the Great War. İhsan hadn’t much cared for the ney before meeting Emin, rather preferring the tanbur as the archetypal instrument of Turkish song, in admiration of the ecstatic feeling it could evoke. But his inclinations changed one night in the Kadıköy house of Tanburi Cemil’s sister, where he’d heard the integrity of its essential force. It happened after the concert Emin and Tanburi Cemil had given in the Şehzadebaşı Ferah theater for the benefit of the Hilal-i Ahmer Red Crescent Society. Once the concert had concluded, Tanburi Cemil wouldn’t let the neyzen flute-master leave his side, and they’d up and forced İhsan to accompany them as well. Holed up for two days and two nights, they’d settled before a rakı table provisioned with meager victuals yet alcohol aplenty. Over these two days İhsan had come to understand the degree to which both men were artists of exception: “I realized through firsthand experience all that’s been lost to us since it isn’t customary to talk about lives yet in the midst of being lived.” At the mention of this night, gastronome-cum-teetotaler Emin Dede, who was quite taken with Tanburi Cemil, recalled, “Written on all the rakı bottles were an array of honorary dedications: ‘To my master, my esteemed master, the venerated Cemil . . .’”
Since that day, İhsan hadn’t forgotten Emin, and until recent years he’d visited his house on the crest of Tophane’s Kadiri Hill as much as his free time allowed. He’d even referred to this old Mevlevî Sufi, once a student of Albert Sorel’s, as comprising his “mystical side!” – for some of Emin’s friends were convinced of his sainthood.
Emin greeted İhsan using the customary epithet: “My holiness, you’ve up and vanished again!” Turning to Tevfik he added, “We’ve lost trace of you for years now, but it’s my fault, I knew the route to your house all along!”
Gesturing to the kudüm twin drums that waited in a bag on the floor beside him, Tevfik said, “I haven’t touched them for years. I took them out of the closet today.”
Culture itself had tapped Emin Dede as the apparatus of its sophistication. His appearance alone could be said to be more delicate than his ney. He slowly entered the garden like
any other creature plucked from everyday contexts, even bearing his quotidian troubles, small discomforts, and anxieties. He shook the hands of the women, addressing them as “Sultana!” and he flattered Mümtaz’s friends. Then he sat comfortably and calmly in the armchair beside İhsan. From behind him, Artist Cemil appeared with the accustomed smile on his composed, angelic face. Regarding the man he exalted in his esteem, whose every gesture he extolled despite variances in lifestyle and milieu, something in Cemil’s very bearing said, “See, he’s the one, this weedy man, the last sentinel of the treasuries of our entire past, this man whose head is the golden buzzing hive of six centuries, whose breath alone preserves a civilization!”
İhsan, smiling: “So they deign to wear you out with a trip here, do they?”
“Pay no heed, my holiness. We’ve come here because we so desired. We’ve partaken of fresh air and we’ve commiserated with friends. Is it always others who are to visit us? Allow us to exhaust ourselves a little as well.”
He was a swarthy man, with gray-blue eyes and of middling height, whose shoulders sagged, giving his body a scarecrow-like appearance. A large, hooked, drooping nose practically divided his gaunt face into two halves, such that the sharp, straight lines of the lips, and the closely cropped, mostly graying mustache that followed managed to round out the face only once the nose ended. In this disposition, rather than one of the greatest music savants of the age, Emin resembled an unseen yet hardworking civil servant of a bureaucracy like customs or the postal service, virtually aloof from the city’s public life. However, should one happen to raise his head and closely regard the eyes resting beneath the thick and curly eyebrows, this diminutive, ordinary-looking man might commune from a realm far exceeding his material being. On their first meeting, mindful of not being a pest, Mümtaz tried to befriend Emin, disciple of Aziz Dede, close companion of Tanburi Cemil – considering the difference in temperament between them, Emin was a patient and tolerant companion – and the last of the Mevlevîs privy to the “secret of the reed.” Mümtaz recollected how his eyes had seized and censured him, nevertheless gently, as if saying, “Why be so preoccupied with my material being? Neither I nor the thing you call ‘art’ are as important as you might suppose. If you can, aspire to the secret of universal love articulated within each of us!” Centuries of Mevlevî cultivation had eliminated everything relating to the ego in him and had seemingly dissolved the genteel, inspired, and patient man within selflessness of sorts; by means of praising his master, Emin often related that one day he’d practiced eight or ten hours straight to reproduce a seven- or eight-note phrase that he’d heard Aziz Dede play and to attain exactly the same modulation. Emin had no individual aspect beside his wee material self half-melted in the intense heat of who knows what inner sun. And this material self hid and vanished each moment behind myriad formalities, decorum, and the acculturation of considering himself one with others and of denying everything individual in a state of humility that we’d consider bizarre today. As Mümtaz looked at him, Neşâtî’s couplet came to mind:O Neşâtî, we’ve been burnished to such extent That we’re secreted in mirrors purely radiant
A Mind at Peace Page 30
