Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Within the jewel, a truth ignited and blazed in its own vast and deep essence. Only sublimity of sorts, a consciousness that had attained the utmost lucidity, or beauty that had killed off the human within it and freed itself of all weakness, could emit such light.

He tried fleetingly to imagine it adorning Nuran’s neck. But he failed; he’d forgotten how to conjure visions of happiness. Mümtaz had no chance of owning this piece. Besides, it seemed to him an impossibility to meet her again in that old mind-set and for them to be drawn to each other. This impossibility unified the inhuman sparkle of the ornament before him with the beauty of the woman in his thoughts.

By distancing herself from his life, Nuran had been cleansed of all her faults and all they’d shared, assuming the radiant hardness of this diamond in an inaccessible stratum of existence. Separation had thus transformed her into a mythical presence beyond Mümtaz’s realm of being.

Had I only ever experienced her at a distance like this, so alone, inherently beautiful, and removed from everything… Thus he’d be spared from stings of conscience and memories that bore into him like an auger. Perhaps this was one of the personas the woman who’d abandoned him assumed sporadically in his mind’s eye. Yet alongside it, there was the woman with whom he’d broken and shared his daily bread for months, his beloved Nuran, a being who’d suffered so much for him, who’d shared all his hopes, who’d lived, temporarily withdrawn from all else, only with Mümtaz and for Mümtaz. But there was more. An array of Nurans wallowing in trivial episodes — whose contexts and colors were taken from inadequacies in Mümtaz’s soul — which she’d all but shattered to shards and stuck into his flesh; Nurans who sought an opportunity to escape from submerged depths where they’d been trapped, surfacing to control Mümtaz’s life. Each of them individually, like the characters in a Wagnerian opera, appeared with its own special mood and manner of possessing him. Each of them subdued him, agitating his person and his nerves to different degrees. Some of them left him in the same distressed psychological state for days, dragging him back and forth between anger and vengeance or the blackest death, then with the slightest cue or under the simplest pretext, she’d relinquish her place to another persona; and Mümtaz’s face, tense with jealousy, his pulse racing with fury, would be transfigured, and an irresistible compassion would tear him asunder, his shoulders would droop under the weight of the sins he assumed he’d committed, and he’d believe he was cruel, insensitive, and selfish — increasingly ashamed of himself and his life.

These personas seemed to prolong jealousy, affection, regret, desire, and desperate devotion; they churned and multiplied within him and his flesh like a great tempest from the netherworld, leaving him without the smallest site to anchor or even breathe, and they incarcerated and depleted him in the very realm where they’d given birth to him; in sum, they comprised his successively changing lifeworlds.

Every outside entity depended on the order Nuran established. They adopted her color, fawned over her, grew and shrank in her radiance to such a degree that Mümtaz, especially in recent days, didn’t have an independent life. He existed in a state of paradox, his conflicting natures pursuing each other; he thought, looked, and felt through their mediation. Meanwhile, time itself had quieted many aspects of this inner tempest and, according to its own rationale, had cast off numerous unnecessary contingencies. In certain respects, within the context of their separation, Mümtaz now related to his beloved through quite different personas more closely resembling his own. He no longer grew jealous of her as in the past. The cruelest and most dishonest of her semblances, the blameworthy, cruel, and mercilessly indifferent presence that obeyed only its instincts, had withdrawn. Now his thoughts and feelings reintroduced another aspect of her with a relatively more calm and remorseful countenance, a Nuran who accepted blame, whom he could envision without her listing his faults.

Above these follies and foibles of every hue hovered the image of a woman who’d absolved him — malcontent martyr to a miscellany of misunderstandings — of his every act of idiocy and inanity; a woman who’d shrouded all of the torments of his life with her beatific grin. Because this smile veiled such enormous, catastrophic, and bleak shortcomings of his, concealing a heart that had been lanced repeatedly by her malevolence, a soul that had lost its trust in people and had forsaken everything in desperation, because this grin revealed nothing, masking and eclipsing all, it became the most horrendous of weapons.

The grin resembled a mirror held aloft so he might observe aspects of his inner self, his faux pas, his guilt-ridden transgressions, and even facets of himself he didn’t yet understand. Mümtaz was no stranger to the way Nuran, in moments of despair and finality, resorted to this smile that sublimated to an unrecognizable degree the woman he knew and loved, making her a foreign beacon on his horizon for the duration she wore it; he was no stranger to how she made use of muteness, which gave her the bearing of an idol whose every line and curve had been culled and created through the visions of centuries; he was aware of the way she took refuge, by degrees, behind this forced smile and quiescent poise, and how from that coign of vantage, distressed and distraught, she peered out over the landscape and over their lives, overcome by the desolation of a poignant epiphany.

During such times, were Nuran to even recognize her surroundings, she wouldn’t have recognized her self.

This final vision summoned by separation and his suffering usurped the places of several Nurans. Many awe-inspiring characteristics of this lady of his intimacy had simply vanished, so the sharp dagger that played directly upon his liver, or the draught that caused him to writhe in agony without killing him outright, might be poised or properly balanced to its utmost effect. None of the childish glee that made him ecstatic remained, none of that lush springtide known only to joyous women, none of that heightened consciousness of being in the thrall of love, of existing within a realm created by being enamored, none of that sense of security, of those always creative leaps of intelligence and élan, none of it whatsoever remained. Bliss was a glass goblet lying in shards. Confronted by the hardness of the diamond before him, the nearly overwhelming flourish of a lush spring had withered. Most pitiful was how Mümtaz hoarded these memories so none of the paths he’d once traversed would vanish. In the mirror of her serene smile his imagination perpetually revealed aspects of paradises lost.

Indeed, a song, a dapple of light that played on the sidewalk, a single sentence uttered midconversation, a florist’s shop along his path, another’s reveries of the future, the resolve to begin work, everything, through a vision of the past, transported him back to the previous year, wherein he was roused to consciousness.

Truth be told, Mümtaz lived a twinned life, like the cobbler in the story from A Thousand and One Nights. On one hand, remembrances of halcyon days never left him, but as soon as the sun rose, the nighttime of separation spread within him in all its torment. The young gentleman, who effectively lived in his imagination, bore heaven and hell together. Between these two boundaries, he lived the life of a sleepwalker, punctuated with violent awakenings along the edges of an abyss. Between these two opposing psychological states, he conversed with those around him, taught his courses, listened to his students, explained their assignments, helped his friends, and argued when he was backed into a corner; that is, he forged through his everyday life.