Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

On only the second day of his arrival, Mümtaz had made numerous friends. He’d wander together with the boys of the house to the citrus groves and to the Karaoǧlan district. They’d even go as far as the walnut groves on the outskirts of the city. Much later he’d come to like the Kozyataǧı neighborhood in Istanbul because it reminded him of this walnut orchard. But for the most part they’d spend their days at Mermerli or at the seaside on the wharf, and toward evening they’d go up to the bluffs of Hastaneüstü.

Mümtaz liked to spend the twilight hours perched on boulders between the road and the sea. The sun above the Bey Mountains girded the hilly undulations in golden and silver armor as if arranging the rites of its own death by preparing a sarcophagus of gilding and indigo shadows; then the arc that had descended and toppled backward spread open like a golden fan, and large swaths of light, bats of fire, fluttered here and there, hanging from the rocks. The ineluctable modality of the visible was as bountiful and lush as a season. The boulders, during the daytime, were only seaweed-covered blocks of stone that wind and rain had eroded with holes like sponges, but because they abruptly came to life in twilight, Mümtaz was besieged by a horde of fabulous beings whose numinous powers and physical forms were superior to man’s, who were mute like fate itself, only communicating through echoes of their existence within mankind. And his small body in their midst — an understanding of life expanding inside him — Mümtaz tried not to be scattered by that astounding gust of apprehension whose origins extended deeply into the past and whorled about his entire being. It was the sea mated with the sun… the hour when all things were reborn in a new form, when voices augmented, when humanity receded as it moved toward the infinite under a firmament that deepened and lost its warmth and friendly countenance, when from everywhere nature declared, “For whatever reason did you go and become the plaything of dreary suffering? Come, return to me, dissolve in whole synthesis, you’ll forget everything, and sleep the comfortable and blithe sleep of dumb matter.” Mümtaz sensed this calling until it reached his vertebrae, and to avoid lunging at the invitation, whose meaning he didn’t fully understand, his tiny being stiffened and recoiled.

At times he did go farther, to the rocky outcroppings that overlooked the sea from the heights; there, at the edge of the precipice facing seaweed patches, he observed how the placid water exposed itself to the last bounty of the evening like a viridian and porphyry mirror, gathering shards of light and harboring them like a maternal womb before occluding them gradually. After the muffled rasping of waves, moving to and fro far below, after the fleeting pianissimo, the whispers of love, the fluttering of wings, the splashing; in sum, after the enunciations of mysterious beings living only for the twilight hour filled quiet interstices between dusk and nightfall, he was summoned by vast invitations with scalloped edges and colorful spectra, by the articulations of thousands of life forms dormant in who knows which mother-of-pearl shell, fish scale, rock hollow, moonbeam, or starlight. Where were they inviting him? Had Mümtaz known, maybe he would have rushed to the occasion. For the sound of the sea is mightier than the sough of love and desire. In darkness, the roar of water spoke in tongues of Thanatos.

With a telltale tremor that showed he was ready to accept the roaring invitation, Mümtaz sought out friendly visions of his as-of-yet incipient life in this black mirror; he sought out the chinar under which his father made his eternal repose, as well as the blithe childhood hours that he’d abandoned abruptly and the black-eyed village girl at the inn, a deep inoculation into his innocent skin; and when he realized this was only a blank mirror, he stood and tried to escape the gigantic shadows of the boulders as if from a nightmare — staggering and stumbling at each stride.

The boulders might very well come alive as he passed them, it seemed, or a hand might verge on reaching out to grab hold of him, or somebody might toss his mantle over his head.

The crowded rockscape made him shudder even in broad daylight. Rather than being a living part of nature, the stones resembled life-forms that had frozen still in the midst of some unspecified cataclysm. But truly horrifying was their appearance during the arrest of his imagination. At such moments they would be ousted from life, eternally alien to him and rejecting him. They seemed to declare, “We are removed from life. Outside of life… That all-nourishing, life-giving sap has withdrawn from us. Even death is not as barren as we.” Verily, next to these rocky outcroppings how vibrant was a lump of clay, clay that he so loved to play with as a boy and would always love. Its soft, malleable existence might take any form or surrender to any will, or any idea. Yet these solid fragments of stone were forever removed from life; the wind might blow, the rain might fall; atom by atom they’d erode, deep lines and furrows would appear on their colossal bodies, but none of it could rid them of the state in which they were formed by the hands of some primordial apocalypse. Inasmuch as they had no apparent inquiry to make on life’s trajectory, they were crude and coarse symbols issuing from infinite time, posing all questions at once.

Occasionally a bat would dart from where he’d stepped, and in the distance another winged beast would call to its fledglings. Once free of the rockscape, he felt relieved. On the flat macadam road he slowed his pace and affirmed his resolve: I won’t be coming back here again! But tastes of the unfathomable are seductive, and the next evening he was back again, or at the seaside, or simply crouched on a boulder beside the road. For the sake of experiencing this titillation alone, he even made excuses to take leave of his friends before nightfall.

The day came when his companions took him to Güvercinlik, to a grotto between Hastaneüstü and Konyaaltı quite some distance from the city. They rambled along the coast for a while, then turned in to the boulders, and finally went underground through a tunnel. Shuffling and crawling on hands and knees in pitch-darkness didn’t appeal to Mümtaz. But at the end of this passage everything was suddenly illuminated, as if the sun were shining through lush, verdant leaves, and within this luminescence they entered a sea cave. Despite their hands and knees being covered with cuts and sores, the light, shifting between deep turquoise and naptha green, excited Mümtaz. When the waves ebbed inside the mass of rock that the sea had hollowed out, there remained a calm, somewhat deep body of water, like an artificial rocaille pool similar a natural pond, with a small island of stone, whose waters were clear enough to reveal fish swimming in its depths and crabs and crustaceans along its rocky edges. This part of the grotto was accessible by sea. Behind it, the part through which they had entered was wider and constituted a slightly elevated, largish cavern filled with rock fragments. When a wave struck and sealed the mouth of the grotto, all was suffused in verdigris light. Then, in a series of odd, seemingly subterranean sounds, the water emptied out, and everything was illuminated again through refractions cast by the sunlit sea. Hands on his chin, Mümtaz watched the chiaroscuro play of light and shadow silently for hours from the perch of a boulder.

What did he contemplate? What did he expect? Had he assumed that the waves would convey something, or had he just surrendered himself to the curious drone made by the water filling and draining the grotto? The sounds bore an invitation, but where, to which arcanum?

By chance, toward nightfall, a caïque that had meandered out along the coast transported them back effortlessly to the pier. Hastily, Mümtaz abandoned his friends and ran home. He wanted to describe what he’d seen to his mother. But she was in such a state that he didn’t dare utter a word and was mindful not to leave her alone again.