Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Whoever happens to write the history of this century will most certainly be mindful of the proliferation of pharmaceuticals. Yaşar was one of the biggest casualties of this epidemic. In addition to a few pharmaceutical warehouses in Istanbul, he’d also made direct contact with pharmaceutical factories, or their representatives, who’d gradually begun sending him, as they did with doctors, varieties of their latest product samples.

The medications weren’t just the victory of modern-day medical science and chemistry. They also came with individual aesthetics, and even literatures. With their meticulous packaging from the most elegant covers and imitation morocco cases down to boxes resembling the most provocative and expensive perfumes, powders, and toiletries, in every size, shape, and color, some petite, graceful, and friendly, as if exclaiming, “I’m as useful as an idea and what’s more, I’m easily carried!” and others with their squat bottles promising all variety of discretion like solemn confidants, they’d instigated a distinct transformation in daily life, or at the least, in urban and street life, with wadding as shiny as velvet and packaging that satisfied one like a new leather bookbinding, its fine linty fuzz shimmering in the sun. These pharmaceuticals wouldn’t just remain the products of a few major factories, they represented initial steps toward turning consumers into the ideal of a brave new humanity. With the artificial ease that they brought, they’d secure the gradual death of nature in mankind. To be sure, Yaşar sensed this lofty ideal, embracing it heart and soul. Thanks to six years of patient research, many involuntarily physiological functions occurred as an effect of Yaşar’s pills. He slept using pills, he attained the clarity of wakefulness with the few aspirin he took upon waking, he worked up an appetite with pills, he digested with pills, he defecated with pills, he made love with pills, and he desired with pills. Companies like Roche, Bayer, and Merck were the mainstays of his life. He wrote the long reports that he presented each month to the Ministry with the help of the tonics from these factories that multiplied human endurance exponentially. The top of his nightstand held a riot of bottles of every imaginable design, decorated with symbols, some wordy with allusions to minerals, mythology, and cosmology, while others sufficed with intimation and innuendo, like the titles of poetry collections. Thanks to these bottles and packages, the long shelf of his dresser was as dazzling as an American bar, and when Yaşar spoke of these medications, he used the most hyperbolic language. Instead of saying that he’d taken vitamin C, he’d say, “For eighty-five cents, I bought a million oranges!” Describing a bottle of Phanodorme or Eviphane that he’d removed from his waistcoat pocket, he’d declare, “Behold the poet laureate of the ages! Each capsule contains at least twenty visions that would never under other circumstances visit the imaginative faculties of a single author!” The hours of the day were divided according to the drugs he took. “Please don’t let me forget, at three o’clock sharp I take my pepsin… It seems I’ve forgotten to take my Eurotropin. May Allah grant that no harm befalls me.”

Yaşar loomed as a true neurotic side effect caused by the cooperation between modern science and marketing for the betterment of mankind.

The pleasure of welcome at Nuran’s house signified a peak of satisfaction for Mümtaz. Unfortunately, Fatma’s tetchiness poisoned this delight.

Since her father had left, Fatma’s natural disposition was a state of insecurity with respect to others — the phobia of losing whatever belonged to her. That is to say, she nurtured jealousy of Mümtaz. And other contingencies made her jealousy more distressing.

The girl couldn’t manage to find any rapport with Mümtaz. First she wanted to be indifferently cool or simply polite; a while later she’d become malicious and spiteful; and in the end, as if to relinquish her world, she’d abandon their company and withdraw, but since the thought, What’s going on downstairs? pestered her, five minutes later she’d appear again, moody and spoiled. Since word of marriage frequently passed in the house, Fatma knew Mümtaz’s status in Nuran’s life. This was the reason her demeanor toward her mother had changed over the past ten days.

None of this could dispel Mümtaz’s joy at being present in Nuran’s house among the things she’d lived with and enjoyed as a girl and adolescent.

Consequently, for Mümtaz, thoughts of Nuran’s home became a separate source of satisfaction. When his beloved went away, leaving him alone, or on days she said she wouldn’t be leaving her house, he got in the habit of conjuring her. Now familiar with the most important framework of Nuran’s life, thoughts of her never left him. Imagining her at the base of the pomegranate tree in the garden or at the breakfast table, or thinking of her in flower beds that she tended by hand, her hair gathered atop her head with randomly placed hairpins, her white morning gown draped in folds recalling Pompeiian frescoes as they clung to and roamed the curves of her body, amounted to delights that filled his hours of solitude.

Nuran’s acts and attitudes as evoked by Mümtaz’s imagination were implausibly sublime: how she cast open the shutters of her bedroom; boiled Turkish coffee for aging Tevfik; brought medicines to her mother; read a book in the garden, head in hands; or served tea to guests in the small parlour room, a haunt since childhood, while seated in the armchair once occupied by grand vizier Âli Pasha, who’d come to pay a get-well visit to her grandfather; how she pointed out the framed verse by Nâilî — “Through the favor and munificence of the exalted Lord we were delivered” — that İbrahim Bey had in time made as a memento of his ten-day detainment at Yıldız Palace; and how she showed off the decorative plates and vases in the window whose ornamentation he’d made with his ink pots of gold and other colors, his hair-tipped pens and fine brushes, as well as those “menageries of glass,” as Nuran put it — a turn of phrase that augmented her grace through the je ne sais quoi of childhood elation.

For Mümtaz, a personal fable of sorts was gradually woven out of Nuran’s time away, and he began to embellish the hours of Nuran’s day — just like medieval painters who illuminated the prayer books of such and such duchess or king around a château with depictions of daily life, seasonal and astrological figures, or scenes from the Sacred Book — through a plethora of visions, through sparkling and multihued bacchanals conveying a wealth of potential like unstrummed lutes.

In this variegated realm, this music of silence that appropriated its every curve and arc from her ordinary movements and from the figures she boldly presented to the moment and span of her inhabitation — the actual Nuran, through an image conjured by her name — “twin lights of the sun and moon” — a vision of golden chalices pilfered from the banquet of the sun, or of water lilies blooming white in the gardens of dawn, like a fecund season, she came, went, thought, listened, and spoke while her presence flung a multitude of secrets and splendors upon the landscapes over which she trod.

To imagine her at any moment of the day, anywhere, yielded an always boundless jubilation, whether Mümtaz evoked her waiting for the ferry at the landing, selecting buttons or lace at the seamstress’s, describing a dress model, speaking with her friends, whether nodding her head “yes” or shaking it “no.”

Two Nurans manifested. One was removed from him, such that her every step transformed her material self a bit more, and through the alchemy of desire and yearning, in effect became a substantiation of the soul, and by bequeathing countless traits of her own to other things, she made all distances and wherever she roamed into a realm of transcendence above the everyday, though she nevertheless lived as always in the center of this realm, constituted by nothing more than kaleidoscopic reflections of her self.