Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“At times I verge on answering this very question. I tell myself that we’re a nation of displacement and exile. A nation that’s been formed and socialized by distances. By the love, suffering, and liberty of distances. Our history and art, at least among the folk, is this way.” Mümtaz paused to think. “And even our classical musiki .”

Were there a sacred campaign that I might join Were I to sink into sands on a pilgrimage to the Kaabe

Nuran had been listening to İhsan’s ideas for the first time, surprised to learn that he was this bound to real circumstances: “The cerebral way that you regard society, as if preparing a synthetic concoction. .”

And she repeated to herself phrases that she recollected from Yaşar’s vitamin prospectuses: “ Vitamin B cannot be readily extracted from foods in which it naturally occurs. As a result of great scientific endeavors, our laboratory has consequently. . ”

“Generations that are obligated to take a formative role can’t look upon life any other way. We’re forced to work, to prepare the foundations for labor, and even to make others do so.”

“But some thinkers claim the contrary, that work dehumanizes people and dims their horizons.”

“Those same thinkers espouse a number of things before coming round to that point. They’re chasing a kind of mysticism within established Europe. They want the opportunity to meditate on the soul. . First I desire the formation of my soul and organization of my material being. What they desire constitutes the essence of any mystical sect. But the social life of a nation is not that of a sect. . and that comes from someone like me with collective leanings. Were I in France, I’d also focus on the individual, contemplating how it might thrive despite society. Or this, or that other thing. . I’d be dissatisfied with the status quo and try to address the deficiencies I’d discovered, and I’d struggle for that newfound cause. In Turkey, now, I’m contemplating what’s in the interest of Turkey.”

“A minute ago you said you wouldn’t abandon your personality or your individuality, whereas now. .”

“Why should I abandon my individuality? And moreover, why shouldn’t I possess personality? The individual is a fact of existence.” In the indeterminacy of reluctance İhsan added, “Just the way trees are the foundation of a forest.”

There came another knock at the door. Mümtaz said, “That’s Emin for certain,” and darted from his chair. Most of the others rushed behind him. As Nuran passed before her uncle, who rose from his armchair, she smiled. She knew that he hadn’t seen Emin Dede for years. A few days ago he was ecstatic, exclaiming, “If we winter in Istanbul, I’ll go visit him frequently…”

Artist Cemil held two ney s wrapped in cloth cases in one hand, and helped Emin Dede out of the automobile with the other.

Emin, extending his hand to İhsan, inquired, “Has Tevfik come as well?” He’d been longtime friends with both. He’d first met Tevfik at the Yenikapı Mevlevî dervish lodge during his early youth. Cemil, who played a longnecked tanbur -lute, had introduced İhsan to Emin during the Great War. İhsan hadn’t much cared for the ney before meeting Emin, rather preferring the tanbur as the archetypal instrument of Turkish song, in admiration of the ecstatic feeling it could evoke. But his inclinations changed one night in the Kadıköy house of Tanburi Cemil’s sister, where he’d heard the integrity of its essential force. It happened after the concert Emin and Tanburi Cemil had given in the Şehzadebaşı Ferah theater for the benefit of the Hilal-i Ahmer Red Crescent Society. Once the concert had concluded, Tanburi Cemil wouldn’t let the neyzen flute-master leave his side, and they’d up and forced İhsan to accompany them as well. Holed up for two days and two nights, they’d settled before a rakı table provisioned with meager victuals yet alcohol aplenty. Over these two days İhsan had come to understand the degree to which both men were artists of exception: “I realized through firsthand experience all that’s been lost to us since it isn’t customary to talk about lives yet in the midst of being lived.” At the mention of this night, gastronome-cum-teetotaler Emin Dede, who was quite taken with Tanburi Cemil, recalled, “Written on all the rakı bottles were an array of honorary dedications: ‘To my master, my esteemed master, the venerated Cemil. .’”

Since that day, İhsan hadn’t forgotten Emin, and until recent years he’d visited his house on the crest of Tophane’s Kadiri Hill as much as his free time allowed. He’d even referred to this old Mevlevî Sufi, once a student of Albert Sorel’s, as comprising his “mystical side!” — for some of Emin’s friends were convinced of his sainthood.

Emin greeted İhsan using the customary epithet: “My holiness, you’ve up and vanished again!” Turning to Tevfik he added, “We’ve lost trace of you for years now, but it’s my fault, I knew the route to your house all along!”

Gesturing to the kudüm twin drums that waited in a bag on the floor beside him, Tevfik said, “I haven’t touched them for years. I took them out of the closet today.”

Culture itself had tapped Emin Dede as the apparatus of its sophistication. His appearance alone could be said to be more delicate than his ney . He slowly entered the garden like any other creature plucked from everyday contexts, even bearing his quotidian troubles, small discomforts, and anxieties. He shook the hands of the women, addressing them as “Sultana!” and he flattered Mümtaz’s friends. Then he sat comfortably and calmly in the armchair beside İhsan. From behind him, Artist Cemil appeared with the accustomed smile on his composed, angelic face. Regarding the man he exalted in his esteem, whose every gesture he extolled despite variances in lifestyle and milieu, something in Cemil’s very bearing said, “See, he’s the one, this weedy man, the last sentinel of the treasuries of our entire past, this man whose head is the golden buzzing hive of six centuries, whose breath alone preserves a civilization!”

İhsan, smiling: “So they deign to wear you out with a trip here, do they?”

“Pay no heed, my holiness. We’ve come here because we so desired. We’ve partaken of fresh air and we’ve commiserated with friends. Is it always others who are to visit us? Allow us to exhaust ourselves a little as well.”

He was a swarthy man, with gray-blue eyes and of middling height, whose shoulders sagged, giving his body a scarecrow-like appearance. A large, hooked, drooping nose practically divided his gaunt face into two halves, such that the sharp, straight lines of the lips, and the closely cropped, mostly graying mustache that followed managed to round out the face only once the nose ended. In this disposition, rather than one of the greatest music savants of the age, Emin resembled an unseen yet hardworking civil servant of a bureaucracy like customs or the postal service, virtually aloof from the city’s public life. However, should one happen to raise his head and closely regard the eyes resting beneath the thick and curly eyebrows, this diminutive, ordinary-looking man might commune from a realm far exceeding his material being. On their first meeting, mindful of not being a pest, Mümtaz tried to befriend Emin, disciple of Aziz Dede, close companion of Tanburi Cemil — considering the difference in temperament between them, Emin was a patient and tolerant companion — and the last of the Mevlevîs privy to the “secret of the reed.” Mümtaz recollected how his eyes had seized and censured him, nevertheless gently, as if saying, “Why be so preoccupied with my material being? Neither I nor the thing you call ‘art’ are as important as you might suppose. If you can, aspire to the secret of universal love articulated within each of us!” Centuries of Mevlevî cultivation had eliminated everything relating to the ego in him and had seemingly dissolved the genteel, inspired, and patient man within selflessness of sorts; by means of praising his master, Emin often related that one day he’d practiced eight or ten hours straight to reproduce a seven- or eight-note phrase that he’d heard Aziz Dede play and to attain exactly the same modulation. Emin had no individual aspect beside his wee material self half-melted in the intense heat of who knows what inner sun. And this material self hid and vanished each moment behind myriad formalities, decorum, and the acculturation of considering himself one with others and of denying everything individual in a state of humility that we’d consider bizarre today. As Mümtaz looked at him, Neşâtî’s couplet came to mind: