Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

In this musical dalliance of Nuran’s, her distinction from her beloved Mümtaz was that she loved gazel vocal improvisations, perhaps with the corporeal attachment of her muliebrity to the deep masculine voice, to its sorrow and its melancholia approaching primitivism. For her, a gazel -song that filled a summer’s night was an articulation of beauty, perhaps constituting an art form distinct from music itself. Furthermore, Nuran knew the strains and folk songs that she’d heard and learned from her grandmother, a well-traveled, experienced old Bektashi. A sparkling new horizon opened for Mümtaz through the way this daughter and scion of an established family, raised along the Bosphorus, admired, like an İsmail Dede Efendi or Hafız Post, and recited, with an expression particular to each piece, village dirges, türkü s from Rumeli, Kozan, and Afşar, traditional dance music of Kastamonu and Trabzon, old Bektashi lyricals, and Kadiri naat -odes to the Prophet. On a number of occasions, while she recited these pieces, Mümtaz felt that Nuran was a daughter of an Eastern tribal clan or a young Kütahya bride going to a maidens’ celebration bedecked in pied velvets, atlas silks, sashes, and silver-threaded slippers. Truly baffling was his discovery, in this refined cosmopolitan, of a shared intimacy with the people whose lilts she’d appropriated — as if she were one of them. As days passed, it all constituted a force that transformed and completed Mümtaz’s dulcinea before his eyes, giving their love a panorama of the order of the soul.

That night, too, at Sabih’s, Nuran successively laid open the bastions of Nühüft and Sultanîyegâh makam s; as she sang these songs — her hands, which he so adored and admired, keeping tempo upon the small, crimson, wave-patterned tablecloth amid a debris of forks and knives — a constellation of sisters augmented the Nurans in his life and phantasies by means of the various expressions continually confronting him in her facial guises. In the course of hours, Nuran had herself forgotten all the discretions that she’d so insistently advised him to maintain. Blurting out, “Come then, Mümtaz, take me home, I believe the rakı has taken hold of me,” she quit the table, which amounted to a declaration of open warfare against Adile. In consult with her other guests, however, the mistress of the house was struggling to dampen some or another nuptial plans with the most strident of caveats, and thereby didn’t take full notice.

For Mümtaz, Seyid Nuh’s piece in Nühüft represented the most faithful aspect of Turkish song. Very few works conveyed the yearning for the eternal in the soul, the wingèd ascension toward the sun, toward illumination and immolation. The Nühüft, the thrust of its élan vital, was the essence of a civilization’s inner world hurtling toward a radiance that obliterated all else. Herein, the singular aim was enthrallment or depletion of a sort. And humanity’s infinity, in this instance, casting off rationalism in a single flutter, was in the process of attaining purity of soul. As Mümtaz listened, he was distilled from our material world; and death, at one pole, became the talismanic mirror before a rational life congruent with Creation; death was the downcast sibling living entangled with its grinning doppelgänger.

Truly bewildering was how this miraculous phenomenon suddenly stopped. Listeners were affected in kind as soon as the music started around a simple couplet of inferior quality. In this matter, the makam had a vital role to play. The lucid melody was laced with such crepuscular undertones that Eros and Thanatos, the two polarities in which the soul of mankind dwelled, merged involuntarily.

Relative to the Nühüft, İsmail Dede Efendi’s Acemaşiran semâi in 6/4 allegro was altogether different in its opulence. After a plethora of deaths, it resembled a searing recollection; a hundred thousand souls languishing in the intermediary state of a liminal ârâf. Here, too, the occult spoke. Here, too, humanity jettisoned many of its inherent qualities. Yet something was being yearned for. Here, Allah, or the Beloved, remained external. We yearned to ascend toward Him, exclaiming in Farsi:

Wheresoever you reside Therein our paradise does abide

Mümtaz sat listening to Nuran’s voice, watching the changes in countenance caused by her straining, and he, too, like İsmail Dede, uttered, “Therein our paradise does abide.”

As Mümtaz listened to this piece and, the türkü s and melodies sung by the increasingly impassioned elderly master of music Emin Dede, he contemplated the groundless animus Adile harbored toward their relationship. How did life manage to thrive between two polarities? At one extent, an array of vehicles for mankind’s exaltation and, at the other, trifling worries, the settling of scores, and random enmities that strove to exclude and banish people from exalted heights.

Or did fate wish to declare, “I will not leave you alone with your soul”? At the table he caught two or three glances Adile cast at him and Nuran. The mistress of the house looked at Mümtaz underhandedly as if to say, “I’ll show you.” But when she came eye to eye with Nuran, she declared, “I’m yours forever. You have no better friend than me.” Adile, in this manner, embraced Nuran, whom she thought was weaker and whom she knew had some breaches in her life. The small-minded settling of accounts had persisted in the same way during Seyid Nuh’s Mi’raj of the Sun, Dede’s expression of love that conflated Allah and Beloved, and the oh-so-profound synthesis of türkü s from Rumeli, or “Turkey in Europe,” with experiences on another horizon like fate, love, suffering, death, and separation. All the same, Adile admired traditional music and drew enjoyment from it. Yet even fine art couldn’t mollify the temperaments of some.

Nuran invited Mümtaz, whom she’d frequently mentioned, to the house. To Mümtaz, Nuran’s residence was like the paradise described in the last couplet of Itrî’s Acemaşiran song. On this count, he longed to see it and its inhabitants. Particularly the way the elderly music aficionado had piqued his curiosity that night by referring to Nuran’s uncle: “He knows this repertoire as well as we do, but he’s a creature of habit. He doesn’t show himself often.”

He found Nuran’s mother to be as he’d expected. Nazife, having come of age around the 1908 constitutional revolution, exhibited a number of endearing characteristics like many who’d grown accustomed to seeing life from beneath a gauzy black veil. She satisfied many a pleasure through a furtive glance. She had a childlike curiosity: “Now I’ve been exposed to this as well. When I go home, I’ll think about it more… What’s happening on the outside? The world in which you live is so different from ours.”

Such thoughts could be understood to be natural impulses among most ladies who’d come of age thirty years ago. Under the influence of those years, she was very progressive in thought but very reserved in action. She’d been loved madly by a husband who was twenty years her senior, and she bore a multitude of personality quirks that accrued from being overly indulged. These traits constituted the persona of Nuran’s mother as wife of Rasim, one-time provincial governor and ney flutist.

The elderly matron’s appropriately timed observations, which she didn’t withhold, her almost childlike interest in current events, her distaste for frivolity, her love of politics, and the coterie of luminaries she knew — much later Mümtaz realized that she’d traced the careers of almost every high official in the Committee of Union and Progress and was a repository of forgotten facts retrieved with astounding memory — represented the changes that the 1908 revolution had forged in women of a certain class. That day, Mümtaz learned what a harmonious synthesis these distinct identities made in Nazife. But the manner of the matron’s speech really drew his curiosity. Only after hearing her did he understand why Nuran occasionally resorted to antiquated words, even delighted in doing so, and why she lengthened and stressed certain syllables. For instance, Nuran pronounced the word pajamas “pa- jah -mas”; in this way, after a very long note, she was able to follow with the slightest of denouements. Known as the “Istanbul inflection,” this equated to one’s being raised within the politesse and refinement that the eighteenth-century Ottoman poets Nedim and Nabî had so admired; what in part constituted the charm of established middle-class families and large households, whose progeny were more often than not married off to one another.