Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“In one you’re with Antoine Ignace Melling; in the other you’re with Shaykh Galip…”

This was Mümtaz’s unfinished song: have as many dalliances as your heart desires.

“You mean I represent all the dead women? A thoughtful gesture, honestly…”

Üsküdar, which knew no end, was a treasure. A little distance beyond the Valide-i Cedid Mosque was the sixteenth-century Aziz Mahmut Hüdai Efendi Mosque. This spiritual sultanate from the era of Sultan Ahmet I had entered into Nuran’s family lore. A little farther ahead was the mosque of Selâmi Ali Efendi, who held the reins for a few years during the rule of Sultan Mehmet IV. In the Karacaahmet district rested Karaca Ahmet — tradition tracing him back to the time of Orhan Ghazi, who ruled the House of Osman in the mid-fourteenth century and was the contemporary of Geyikli Baba of Bursa, one of the mystical “Khorasan dervishes,” and maybe a fellow ghazi of his — and in Sültantepe rested Celvetî Bâkî Efendi at his eponymous mosque.

Nuran was quite curious about the dervish orders, but since neither she nor Mümtaz bore a mystical side, they didn’t dwell upon it. One day she’d said in that girlish tone she assumed when the urge struck, “If I’d lived back then, I would’ve certainly become a Celvetî.”

But did they actually believe in all of this?

“This is the Orient, and herein resides its beauty. A lethargic world loath to change, all but embalmed within its traditions; but the East did discover one secret of significance. Though perhaps because the mystery was discovered prematurely, it proved to be harmful…”

“And what is that?”

“The secret of being able to see oneself and all existence as constituting a single entity. Maybe because the East sensed future agonies, it came up with this panacea. But let’s not forget that the world might only be saved by this mind-set.”

“Do you suppose the East was able to create an ethics out of its discovery?”

“I don’t think so, but because the East took solace in the discovery, it restricted possibilities of action for better or worse. Within a semipoetic dream, the Orient lived on the peripheries of reality. Needless to say, I don’t find this worldview appealing; it strikes me as plodding and tiresome, like a journey by camel caravan…” In Mümtaz’s mind, the camel trains of his youth that had once lined up before the hotel in Antalya came to life. And he worried he might not be able to return from that time of agonizing türkü s. “How exceptional: the image of a camel-train on the empty horizon during twilight…”

“Allah, what a bizarre people we are,” she said. With an intimation that suddenly rose within her, she asked Mümtaz, “Why is it that we’re so bound to the past?”

“Whether we like it or not, we belong to it. We admire our traditional music and for better or worse it speaks to us. For better or worse we hold this key that unlocks the past for us… The past relinquishes its epochs to us one after another and dresses us in its clothing. Because we harbor a treasury within ourselves and perceive our surroundings through a Ferahfezâ or a Sultanîyegâh makam , even Lebîb Efendi is a source of art to us.”

In Mümtaz’s esteem, everything from an Istanbul paysage to the entire Turkish culture, its filth, its decay, and its splendor was contained in traditional music. The Occident roamed dumbly in our midst like a stranger due to its inability to fathom our music. And many a vista appeared before our eyes accompanied by a melody.

“Not to mention that when a work of art, something of intrinsic value, is underscored by music it is transformed. Strange, isn’t it? In the end human life doesn’t embrace anything but sound. We exist as if passing over material things, as if barely touching them. Yet through poetry and music…”

Mümtaz’s obsession with things past gave Nuran the inkling that he wanted nothing more than to be shut up in catacombs. The world certainly offered myriad pleasures and other modes of thought. She liked Üsküdar, but it was dilapidated and its inhabitants impoverished. Among the throngs of unfortunates, Mümtaz forged ahead, blithely spouting “Acemaşiran” and “Sultanîyegâh.” But what about society? Where was the overture to life? Actually doing something, treating the afflicted hordes, finding work for the unemployed, bringing smiles to crestfallen faces, delivering these people from being nothing but relics of the past… Or had the episodes that he’d confided about his childhood affected him more profoundly than she’d assumed? Am I living in a country vanquished by Death?

Taking Nuran by the arm, he pulled her away from the front of the ablution fountain. “I know,” he said. “A new life is necessary. Maybe I’ve mentioned this to you before. In order to leap forward or to reach new horizons, one still has to stand on some solid ground. A sense of identity is necessary… Every nation appropriates this identity from its golden age.”

Mümtaz nonetheless suspected that he, too, bore traces of ambivalence. Not because he admired time past but because he couldn’t deliver himself from the annoying assault of the consciousness of death.

Their frenzied infatuation arose somewhat from this realization. The fact that he, and maybe he alone, knew this better than anyone was troubling. Often Mümtaz suffered under the assumption that the disquieting notion of death separated him from others. Didn’t this absolute comprise the clockwork that had regulated his dreams since childhood? In his love for Nuran, didn’t he consider her courage to live and her beauty something like life’s victories? Whenever he took her into his arms, wasn’t he declaring to the afreet of death looming just beyond her head, “I’m on the verge of vanquishing you. I’ve defeated you, here, regard my weapon and my shield”?

Nuran’s likely discernment of this truth made Mümtaz anxious.

“We need to separate two things. On one hand there’s a need for social progress. This can be achieved by analyzing social realities and by continually working to develop them. Naturally, Istanbul won’t remain just a place that produces lettuce. Istanbul, and each part of the homeland, requires a reform program. But our attachments to the past are also part of these social realities, because those attachments constitute one of the manifest forms our life has taken, and this persists into the present as well as the future.

“On the other hand there’s our realm of pleasure. Or, in short, the realm we inhabit. I’m no aesthete of decline. Maybe I’m searching for what’s still alive and viable in this decline. I’m making use of that.”

Nuran concurred through laughter, “I understand that, Mümtaz. However, at times one risks remaining on the sidelines of life, living through just one single idea. In which case, completely different images come to my mind.”

“For instance?”

“You won’t be upset with me?”

“On the contrary, why should I be?”

“Something like an ancient corpse interred with all its adored objects, including jewelry, gold ornaments, and images of beloved friends and family. Once entombed, he comes alive and his former life begins. Stars shimmer, lutes play, colors speak, and seasons produce their progeny. But forever on the other side of death. Always conceptually, like a dream that belongs to another…”

“First, like an Isis, a fertility goddess bearing the golden disk of the sun, your image engraved upon a wall comes to life ever so slowly, sloughing off the constrictions of the ancient design, and you lean over my decayed body… but honestly, genuine art is created in this way. The dead are living in our heads at this very moment. To just live one’s own life through another’s thoughts, or to force time to accept an aspect of your being. Take, for example, the ‘Hunched İmam’… the Hunched İmam, what a comical name! But what do we think about when listening to Tab’î Mustafa Efendi through his Aksak Semâi today? To us, he’s a genuine warden of life and death. And just conjure, if you will, his existence for a moment. An unfortunate soul living off alms from a mosque charity in Üsküdar on one of these hilltops, residing in a suffocating wooden house squeezed between the manors of pashas. A casualty of life condemned, after removing his shoes at the threshold, to sit on his knees in a constricted corner at the gatherings of grand viziers from Fazıl Ahmet Pasha to Baltacı Mehmet Pasha. Maybe he wasn’t even able to find his way into such gatherings. He might have spent his days among the lower echelons. Maybe he survived on handouts and small donations. Whenever we recite his songs, however, he makes an astonishing resurrection. He overtakes the roads of Çamlıca through which Sultan Mehmet IV rode his charger bedecked in gold and gems, or rather, he infuses the entire panorama. And suddenly the man waiting for a more cunning compatriot to give him the opportunity to earn an extra five or ten kuruş with a ‘Master, come join us in the mevlûd birth song of the Prophet tomorrow!’ is transformed into one possessed of ample means of admiration and recognition… and maybe we’ve learned to appreciate each other by these very means.”