Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

The house in Kandilli was the most striking and wondrous of Nuran’s realms, and most transformed into abstract reality by this miraculous phenomenon, down to the open hall’s wood siding interspaced with laths. And her transformative alchemy, beginning here, incrementally radiated throughout his life.

Then there was the second, the Nuran of his company, who, by her material presence, diminished his phantasms to nothing but infantilism, who, from afar, in one stroke erased whatever he’d conjured. As soon as she made her entrance, the instant she appeared at a prearranged rendezvous, a ferry landing or street corner, Mümtaz’s imagination sputtered and ceased.

Mümtaz tried repeatedly to ponder the emotions raised by her approach. Her approach, he decided, constituted a sort of mesmerism of the intellect. Everything seemed to vanish the instant she appeared at the top of the street. Anxieties evaporated, apprehension abated, and even exhilaration lost its former radiance. The proximate Nuran focused the bewitching aura emanating from her presence onto one single entity, one individual, Mümtaz, whom she took into her palms and formed into luculent clay.

Even Mümtaz ceded his fundamental conception of the real whenever confronted by Nuran; Mümtaz, who in previous relationships belittled the fairer sex with near derision, who found his own exuberance laughable, and even amid the most poignant pleasures, in flagrante delicto, carefully tracked his bestial stimulation with a cerebral facet of his yet-lucid mind as if observing the workings of an automaton he’d cranked up himself, and who, beyond visual stimulation, received no purity of pleasure from the female figura.

True, this wasn’t just a figment of the imagination. He didn’t think this way because a lunatic had taken over the asylum of the intellect, either. Even had he not lost his mind, her mystery would survive in his delirium. Thus, whether near or far from Nuran, no wisdom or established truth could provide succor. Neither the Old Testament, which never left his side at one time, nor the philosophers or mentors he admired offered anything that might counter his agitation. These thinkers wrote of the dangers of women, carnal desire, and lust. In Mümtaz’s esteem, his escapade with Nuran was of another magnitude entirely. Nuran was the fountainhead of life, the maternal source of all realities. Consequently, even when fully satiated by her, he still hungered for his beloved, his mind didn’t turn away from her for an instant — as he sunk into her, he achieved wholeness of being.

On occasion Mümtaz attempted to explain his affection for Nuran through an absolute cellular affinity, and through the sensual chemistry they shared, he learned about the vast enigma nature had instilled within them. Perhaps what Plato had said was true, and in the circle of being, fate, by means of their love, had again reunited the halves of a singular presence rent asunder. Mümtaz, in other words, believed he was living through a Mi’raj of Being and an Exaltation of Eşya.

So fully did he feel the forces of Creation in his flesh, during certain nocturnal hours he wondered why he wasn’t indeed conversing with rocks, birds, and blades of grass in the garden. The secret of this enigma again rested with Nuran. She was no ladylove of sterile contentments, hidden and jealous. Complete abandon issued from her person. Nuran depended on a minimum level of selfhood. She lived through her milieu. Despite attempts by both to avoid burdening each other with the tribulations of their lives, Mümtaz understood how at times she pitied him on account of people she’d never met.

Twice per week they met for morning trysts. Nuran quite liked his house in Emirgân. “I no longer feel the incline, that’s how I’ve gotten used to it. It isn’t exhausting because I’m approaching you.” Hearing this surprised Mümtaz; Nuran, who discussed everything thoroughly, who revealed all of herself, hadn’t imparted a single word about their relationship. She’d even found the question “Are you happy?” superfluous. For her, love wasn’t the expenditure of emotions through words, but the complete surrender of herself to the tempest in Mümtaz’s soul. Perhaps, captive in his arms, she assumed he could read her every thought from her face. This proved to be somewhat true. In the changing expressions of her countenance, he could read everything except the ciphers of feminine nature, the elements of the esoteric present even in Nuran.

Not a single spot existed on her small face with which he wasn’t familiar. For Mümtaz, her face became his panorama of the soul: the way it blossomed to love like a flower, closed definitively upon a despairing smile — the metallic radiance burning in her eyes asquint — and not least of all the way her face changed by degrees like a daybreak over the Bosphorus. Nuran spoke, listened, and agreed or disagreed through smiles and gazes, rather than through words.

She resorted to glances that vacillated from the most radiant jewels to the keenest scimitar glints. Before these various implements, Mümtaz at times found himself in a state of vulnerability more precarious than death. At other times her eyes coronated him with the most opulent of crowns known to the world, spreading at his feet pelts of reverence that destiny deemed unfit for the soles of others. With a look, she dressed him up and stripped him down, at one moment turning him into a pitiful, forsaken malcontent with no recourse but Allah, and at the next into the very master of his fate.

Day in, day out, Mümtaz harbored Nuran’s glances and the sounds of her laughter, which resembled sobs of embrace and ecstasy. Her gaze and gaiety confronted him at every turn. His soul — tirelessly diving into the sea of her eyes — at each moment discovered new sources of strength and anguish in this ocean of riches. Her smile left a series of gardens blooming on his skin, in his blood, and throughout his being. Endless gülistan s drove him mad with pleasure such that they almost provoked him, more than once, to breathe in the bed upon which he lay, the objects he touched, and the lifeblood coursing through his veins. Inanimate objects accepted a godly visitation, coming to life through the memory of encounter, and in transitory but wistful moments of enlightenment, became cognizant of the past, the present, the future, and the immediate environment.

On any given morning of Nuran’s impending arrival, he woke early, heading straight for the sea and returning after bathing. Fully aware that he wouldn’t be able to accomplish a single task, he made the attempt nevertheless, but in the end just waited impatiently before the door as had happened on their first day alone.

O Nâilî, whensoever the moonlike beloved nears step by step, Does that not equal world upon world of separations suffered?

Mümtaz’s most faithful companion at such times was this couplet by the seventeenth-century poet Nâilî. Then, in time, a mysterious force would erupt within him as if announcing the approach of the anticipated presence. When he saw Nuran at the top of the street, his entire being emptied toward her strides.

“Couldn’t I find you preoccupied with your work just once, Mümtaz? If I could only catch you distracted and unawares.”

“Only if you were sleeping in the next room or preparing artichoke hearts.”

“You mean to say that after we’re married I’ll be left to rot in the kitchen?”

Overwhelmed with apprehension and a guilty conscience as if he’d in fact forgotten her amid quotidian tasks or a consuming idea, filled with the agony of oversights beyond redress, he’d pause to kiss her then and there.

Nothing matched the surrender of Nuran’s initial kiss. Then she’d say, “Let’s see what you’ve done?”