Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“Wasn’t it Çiçek Hatun, Lady of Flowers? Anyway, how did the journey to Bursa go?”

“Yes, Lady of Flowers, a nice nickname. Nice, in fact, quite beautiful!”

Nuran blushed and with a childish lilt said, “We were meant to go, too. I’d very much like to!”

“Let’s go then. . the season hasn’t yet come to a close.”

Instead of answering, Nuran made a doleful gesture with her chin as if to say, “Under these circumstances it’s not possible. We’ve locked lips within mirrors of the past… None of our desires will manifest with any facility or felicity.” İhsan paid no attention to them as he chased his thoughts.

“In the fifteenth century, had Cem Sultan succeeded to the Ottoman throne or had Mehmet the Conqueror lived twenty years longer, what do you think would have happened? His untimely death amounted to the greatest of tragedies. History dictates that lengthy reigns are always beneficial. For example, consider the rule of Queen Elizabeth or Victoria. Of course, if the conditions are right! Had Sultan Mehmet reigned for twenty more years, perhaps today we’d be a nation that had lived the Renaissance in its time. A bizarre wish, isn’t it? Time doesn’t flow backward. Even so, one succumbs to visions moving from the known to the desired.”

“Even stranger is how we’re unable to transform our lives despite all this accumulated experience.”

“Had Mehmet lived… but he did not, and Cem Sultan was unable to triumph in his struggle for the throne. All the frenzied commotion, even betrayal, the desire, hope, and agony reduced to nothing but a small mausoleum. He rests beneath an ordinary dome together with his mother amid an array of tiles. But their remains, along with hundreds and thousands of others, made Bursa what it is. I visited during its most sublime season. Granted there was still considerable heat. But in the evenings the air cooled. I was mad for the flowers. Everywhere, they made the music of silence or a musical idyll.”

Macide temporarily quit her blue voyage: “İhsan, do you remember the solitude of the evening lightning, you know, when we looked out from the Green Mosque. . and later, the morning star?”

“Macide adores the firmament,” İhsan said.

“As long as the skies aren’t cloudy… I can’t tolerate cloudy skies. At such times I always turn inward.” She’d uttered this softly, as if for her own sake. Her disposition revealed the distinct bow of cut flowers wilting toward vase water. But the autumn light in this garden, transfiguring it into a lute and filling it with music, wouldn’t allow Macide to indulge in melancholy. Resisting this required an emotion quite different than melancholy or misery, one of those despotic desires that occluded and erased everything. She turned her face back again toward the skies, to the sole and elegant, metaphysical and grand leaf of the firmament, losing herself in a venture of the infinite.

Such escapes constituted moments of great bliss in her life. One day in the hospital, a day she’d wept frequently, passing through numerous pincers of death, she’d discovered a window open to this azure invitation, from where her thoughts had taken wing toward the infinite. From that day onward, a part of her always passed from one deep blue stratum to another. Like a tired desert traveler, at times she’d come to rest at the base of a cluster of light. No one knew as did Macide how the light and its lucidity surpassed the confines of any reality. Presently more than half her being existed in this illuminated sky. She and İhsan sat at the base of a tree of radiance, conversing.

Tevfik made a hand gesture. “Hold on, now, I’m going to test my voice!” He smiled at İhsan as if to say, “Turn back the clock.” And he began the Farsi melismata of the Nevâkâr song:

Whilst the rose sapling of the gathering does flourish, where is the rosy-cheeked cupbearer?

This was Itrî, an alchemist of genius. Nuran kept tempo with her hand on her knee, her gaze intent upon the peculiar sparkle in her uncle’s eyes.

İhsan harmonized in a low voice, as he’d done during the armistice years after World War I in the penitentiary where Tevfik had visited him.

Tevfik fell silent after reciting the first lines that set the crystal of the Nevâ alight then, upon completing the variations of the makam progression, said: “That’s it… it’s been years since I’ve sung that. I practically followed the memory of my voice. I’ve completely forgotten the rest.”

Mümtaz and Nuran stood stunned as if they’d returned from great distances.

Tevfik’s voice assumed a force through the Nevâkâr that they’d rarely witnessed, as if somewhere a Simurgh had erected a grand palace from a river or a flood of luminance. But more phenomenal was the way material objects in their surroundings suddenly transfigured through Itrî’s alchemy!

“What’s done is done. Might you honor us with a recital of the ‘Song in Mahur’ as well?”

Tevfik grumbled, “The Mahur song?” He looked at Mümtaz with ridicule! “Very well then, but in a slow voice.” And he actually searched for the makam in slow meter before his voice took wing:

And you left even my soul full of yearning. .

No, this was something else; none of the glory of Itrî existed here; just now they’d all had the same thought. Each had been incarcerated separately in a stone cell carved from igneous rock. İhsan said, “Itrî is quite communal! But this is nice as well.” He fell silent for a while; he felt that they’d each again been imprisoned in the same manner. “It’s difficult to escape the mood of certain things,” he said.

Mümtaz: “Yes, it’s difficult… so difficult that at times I ask myself, ‘What are we?’”

“We are this… this very Nevâkâr. This very ‘Song in Mahur’ and countless other expressions that resemble them! We are their semblances as they manifest within us; we are the ways of being they evoke within us.”

“Yahya Kemal used to say, ‘Our novel is our song,’ and he had a point there.”

“Vagary. . each day I turn to music a number of times. And each time I return empty-handed.”

İhsan: “Patience.”

Mümtaz, thoughtfully nodding his head: “Yes, patience. . patience dans l’azur! ”

“That’s exactly it, Valéry’s ‘patience dans l’azur’ ! Don’t forget that you’re only at the beginning. This time in Bursa I made close observation of this phenomenon. There music, poetry, and mysticism are expressed together! The stones pray, the trees intone divine mantras.”

Tevfik stared at Mümtaz affectionately. He was pleased by his naïve excitement and enthusiasm. Will he be able to accomplish anything, I wonder? He would, of course, should life deign to grace him with the opportunity.

A commotion ensued at the door.

Selim, Orhan, Nuri, and Fahri entered in the unchanging pecking order and ceremony that held sway among them. Orhan nudged forward the short Selim, whose company he always kept, and followed behind him as if to say, “What would become of you if it weren’t for me?” Nuri wiped his glasses at the threshold to better see the setting. Last of all, Fahri closed the door behind them.

İhsan offered a mild “Welcome!” to the group. Then he continued, “Don’t dare misunderstand me!” he said. “I’m not being mystical; rather I’m seizing upon brilliance, upon a concept that is reality itself. I want us to know and appreciate ourselves. Only in this manner, by being ourselves, can we hope to discover what’s human.”

Orhan asked, “What astonishes me is how on one hand you insist on a context of humanism and spiritual values while on the other hand on social development, demanding the regulation of labor from the get-go. Aren’t you being slavish to the material side of things?”