Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“You know about the practice of exegesis, right, tefsir ? Weighing and considering a text to absorb it as part of one’s human experience? If only we could initiate that. That’s what we haven’t been able to do. I just now used the word ‘appreciate,’ but it’s not enough to ‘appreciate,’ either; we need to go beyond that. We don’t know how to experience ideas and emotions like living, breathing things. Meanwhile, this is what our fellow citizens want.”

Orhan, incredulous: “Do they really? It seems to me that our citizens have been indifferent from the get-go. Throughout history they’ve remained at such a remove from us that. . they’re practically helpless in this regard; or at the very least harbor suspicions.”

“Yes, our people do want this. If we stopped looking at history through the lens of today’s grievances, you’d think this country was like any other. The distinguishing factor is the lack of a middle-class here. Developments were always pregnant with the possibility of its formation, but it didn’t occur. The point of divergence begins with this fact. The indifference or suspicion of the people is nothing but a fable that we’ve concocted. Nothing but a rhetorical tactic we’ve seized upon to pin our opponents in ideological skirmishes. You know what I mean; those fleeting Pyrrhic victories that glimmer for an instant only in a reader’s mind or that simply remain confined to the editorial pages of a skimmed newspaper? Victories of that sort! In fact, our city dwellers and villagers do confide in intellectuals and do heed them. What other recourse is there? Two centuries of political upheaval has forced us to live in a sort of battle formation. Threats of absolute certainty gave rise to such protocol. Our citizens have always confided in intellectuals and have walked the paths they’ve blazed.”

“And they’ve always been misled, haven’t they?”

“No, or more precisely, when we’ve been misled, so have they. I mean, as is the case in every nation. Do you really think there’s something like rational progress in history? That’s beyond the realm of possibility. But the cumulative strength of the society transcends the missteps of a single generation. It gives us the illusion that everything’s progressing apace. Rest assured that we’ve been misled and have made as many mistakes as any other nation.”

“Do you even like the ordinary folk of this country?”

“Everybody who admires life has affection for the folk. .”

“For life or the folk? It seems to me that you admire life or the concept of it more, isn’t that so?”

“The folk themselves constitute life. They’re both its human landscape and its singular source. I both admire and savor the people. Sometimes they’re as beautiful as an idea, sometimes as crude as nature. With them, all things are writ large. More often than not, they’ll fall as silent as vast seas. But when they find the tongue with which to speak…”

“But to approach them — you aren’t able to approach them! Their miseries, agonies, anxieties, and even pleasures remain closed to you. I mean to say closed to us all. When I worked in Adana, I felt this quite tangibly. I always remained at the door.”

“Who knows? Certain doors appear closed because we aren’t before them but behind them. All comprehensive things are this way. When you try to confine it to a formula, it recedes. You descend into trivial miseries. One moment you’ll be stuck in reason, logic, cynicism, and denial, and in the next you’ll be overcome by impossibility, incapability, and revolt. . Meanwhile, if you seek it within yourself, you’ll discover it. This is a matter of discipline, or even of method.”

“Okay, but how will we find it? It’s so confounding. . At times I feel confined to a glass container like Goethe’s Homunculus.”

İhsan, musing: “Don’t suppose I’ll answer by advising, ‘Break out of your shell!’ In that case, you’ll just dissipate! Whatever you do, don’t break your shell! Expand it and make it part of yourself, refine and rejuvenate it with lifeblood. Make your shell part of your skin.” He suspected he might be playing rhetorical games to avoid being cornered by his former students, but no, these were his genuine thoughts. The individual ought to preserve itself. Nobody had the right to dissolve into Creation. Individuals should remain as individuals, but they ought to fill themselves with experience. He added: “The error of the Homunculus was that he didn’t turn his protective vessel into a living organism, he didn’t unite with all of Creation from that surface; in other words, his mistake was being unable to coexist fully. The problem wasn’t the shell per se.”

“But you’ve misunderstood me, sir. You haven’t been able to achieve that state of mind either! Had you, you wouldn’t be seeking or trying to foster it within yourself. You’d be regarding it as reality imposing itself upon you and the setting, like a collection of values and truths. You wouldn’t be attempting to discover it like a truth belonging to you alone. I don’t buy it. In a sense you’re the one who’s fabricating, whereas I’m talking about approaching what already exists.”

İhsan looked at Orhan’s face compassionately before saying, “I’m not sure what good such talk does. But I’d like to be more explicit. I understand your doubts. You want me to forgo myself, to deny myself. You see affection as a voluntary matter. In this respect, it’s dissatisfying. Your advice is to:

Toss your heart to the vortex and venture out as the soul of vastness

“Or else you’re confronting me with the people and folklife as a single reality or obligation. You think the same way about yourself, and it pains you because you can’t actualize it. But you’re overlooking one point, namely, that before all else you constitute an autonomous self. Above all I aspire to be faithful to myself. This comprises my spiritual integrity. Only after I’ve attained that might I be of any use to others. Being faithful to myself, that is, adopting certain ethics, is what has separated me from my surroundings from the beginning. Necessarily I’d slip away from ordinary people. After finding myself at this extreme, I’d return to them again. That’s why I’d admire them and, as you say, nurture them in my being. To enter into a mystical trance state or to lose myself in the ‘oceanic’ would serve no purpose for me or my surroundings.

“This means that I perceive life through the frameworks that I want to preserve. These frameworks are my self and my historical persona. I’m a cultural nationalist. I’m a person whose reality reflects a guiding principle. But this doesn’t mean that I’m estranged from the folk; on the contrary, I’m at their command.”

“But you can’t see their suffering, can you?”

“I can. But that’s not my locus of intervention. I know that as long as I see them as being wronged, I’ll only lay the groundwork for their eventual cruelty. Why do we endure such suffering, I mean, the world at large? Because every struggle for the sake of liberty gives rise to new orders of injustice. I want to end tit-for-tat retaliations with the same weaponry. I want to begin the struggle from the very vessel within which we’ve been kneaded and formed. I’m about Turkey. Turkey is my lens, my measure, and my reality. I want to perceive Creation, Humanity, and everything else from there, from that vantage point.”

“That’s not enough!”

“It’s enough to avoid the pitfall of utopia. And it’s even enough for those who want to do something positive.”

“Okay then, go ahead and define the ‘Turkey’ about which you speak.”

İhsan sighed. “That’s the crux of the matter. Locating that…”