Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

The difference between them was that Mümtaz perceived his beloved through a matrix of abstractions. Some Nurans traipsed along the Bosphorus seafront at the Kanlıca residence in shorts or a bathing suit; others struggled against sail and gale in a caïque, or slept beneath the sun with eyelashes fanned downward, their firmly ripened faces fruits, deep within whose flesh swirled rejuvenating and redolent essences; still other Nurans floated face up in the sea, clambered aboard a rowboat, spoke, laughed, and plucked caterpillars off tree branches; yes, a plethora of Nurans congregating as a multitude of figures with experiences spanning the centuries entered into Mümtaz’s imagination.

Some of these figures, like poses and fleeting facial expressions, emerged from her deportment at any particular moment. Others, meanwhile, belonged to the consecutively manifesting identities in Nuran’s living presence, through the awakening of a surplus of legacies inherited from her forebears. Had he never seen the photograph of Nuran wearing a Mevlevî outfit that İclâl had once shown him, Mümtaz would have still compared the seated Nuran, legs folded beneath her as she listened to a gramophone record, to miniatures of an Orient even farther east than Istanbul.

During any ordinary moment, in her comportment, her clothes, her changing expressions during acts of love, his beloved had a variety of personas conjuring figures that had passed before her into the immortal Mirror of Ars ; personas evoking, with augmented intensity and perhaps in an agonizing way, Mümtaz’s near obsession and the pleasures of her possession. Renoir’s portrait of a reading woman was one such figure. Beneath a radiance falling from above, illuminating her hair like a golden spray, the flaxen dream burgeoning like a posy of roses between the dark naphtha green background and her outfit of ferrous black cloth, with pink tulle concealing her neck, served as one of the most faithful aesthetic mirrors to certain passing hours of his ladylove through a handful of similarities including the pleasant calm of her face, the dark line of her lowered eyelids, the abrupt gathering of the chin into a small protrusion, and the sweet, almost nourishing smile upon her lips. Mümtaz’s imagination, within its obsession for Nuran, at times took her resemblance to the Renoir even further, and uncovered in her figure a likeness to the exuberance of flesh depicted by venerated Venetian masters of the Renaissance.

Tonight, however, against the backdrop of the gilded night issuing from the open window, within the wide décolleté of her gown, the woman with bare, sunburned arms and her hair parted down the middle ever so hastily after leaving the hamam of the sea was not the lady of intimate hours — evening light dripping like honey into a room with drawn curtains — pursued by so many poets and painters from the 1890s onward and captured by Renoir after repeated attempts. Presently, through the harsh cognizance and intense vivacity of her half-shaded face and head, and a keenness in her eyes that threatened to devour her entire face, Nuran more closely recalled the Florentine woman in Ghirlandaio’s Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple , recalling the semiancient earthly glory that flowed through her entire being and into the piazza receding to a distant vanishing point, her left hand perched upon her hip and her head cocked gracefully, highlighting the slight protrusion of her temple and the dimple on her chin which all but touched her shoulder.

Semblances of Nuran, transforming from moment to moment, became the young man’s agony and ecstasy. These medallions, or labryses, warranted individually by a momentary thought, a feeling of pleasure, a sudden sensation, or a gesture didn’t leave him in hours of solitude but emerged through a recollected sentence, a page in a book, or an idea. The most poignant pleasure, however, and naturally the sharpest anguish, came with Nurans that came to life within a piece of music heard out of the blue. These semblances manifested abruptly within the arabesque of the melody or the golden rain of the musical ensemble, they appeared and disappeared there, and they glared and jeered at Mümtaz from a measure of time transcending everyday experience, and consequently, the mode of the memory altered and became an echo of prior existences stirring awake.

The venture of living augmented exponentially through the enchantments of seeking Nuran in his surroundings and his past, discovering traces of her seasoning in all experiences, and seeing her before him in the legends, faiths, and arts of centuries — essentially through different personas yet always as herself.

Nuran, in his perspective, represented the golden key to time past as well as the seed of the private fable that Mümtaz considered the first condition for all forms of art and philosophy.

Mehmet’s beloved, whom he never saw, neither passed through the ring of these personas nor did he digress in his private fable, which was omnipresent in all things.

Mehmet adored and thought of his girlfriend without seeking in her the traces of any literary heroine, without savoring her bouquet in any chance chalice of music, and he approached her with the virility of a primal man who satisfied everything, every pleasure, through his body. The pleasures Mümtaz sought across centuries were for Mehmet satisfied solely by the flesh.

Likewise the Boyacıköy coffeehouse apprentice didn’t regard Anahit as a presence whose semblance might be found in the heavens. He neither sensed his own fate in the depths of her eyes, nor thought the rites and rituals of a forgotten faith had revived as he burrowed in her flesh. He didn’t fear that she’d leave him, and when she was away, he rested by laying out his tired body on the dusty stones of the quay or the fishing nets heaped before the coffeehouse, or he teased the neighborhood housekeeping girls; and later, when he understood within his being that he needed her, stretching slowly, he cast off the torpor that had overwhelmed him and called for her, placing beneath the customary stone the key to his single-room inside the old fortress walls so that she might easily enter; and knowing that she’d rouse him when she arrived, he slept heartily without giving it another thought.

Tonight Mehmet was downright irritable and doleful. Mümtaz had grown accustomed to reading like a book the face of this youngblood who’d worked for him for three years now. He must have certainly argued with his girlfriend. Or else he’d caught sight of her hereabouts in a garden or restaurant with another. Maybe this was the cause of their quarrel. In any case, Mehmet’s manner of enduring anguish varied completely from his own.

Mehmet represented a facet of undaunted humanity. He found resolve in his own self. Alone now before the restaurant, he puffed out his chest like a fighting cock. This conveyed respect and adoration for his physicality. Essentially it amounted to a primitive narcissism of sorts such that he only accepted a woman’s body as a mirror, and when his reflection became slightly blurred therein, he cast it aside contemptuously and took up with another. Women were capable of the same. Nuran might one day act similarly toward him.

This thought, descending upon Mümtaz, assumed such cruel proportions that Nuran took notice: “What’s happened? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “A bad inclination of mine. The tendency to mull over an idea until it assumes its cruelest possible form.”

“Tell me more.”

Mümtaz explained, somewhat mocking his own state of mind. Why should he conceal something from Nuran relating to her? She listened, at first with ridicule, and later through a changed expression.

“Why don’t you live in the present, Mümtaz? Why do you either dwell in the past or in the future? The present hour also exists.”