Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

O Neşâtî, we’ve been burnished to such extent That we’re secreted in mirrors purely radiant

And this couplet conveyed a truth. Emin Dede was a man concealed in his material being and culture. It was futile to seek, in such a venerated artist, any pretentious flourish or affect fostered by withdrawing to a corner and wallowing in inner fugues. Rather, he resembled a small sea stone licked, swallowed, and ground down over centuries by repeated waves that pounded eternal shores; a stone whose particularities had been erased; one of those smooth, dense stones, thousands of which one sees while walking along the coast! Nor did he give any indication that he’d preserved the final rays of a worldly realm that had withdrawn from our midst to become its affluent treasurer of sorts. In humility, friendship, and equality before one and all, he knew nothing of transformations in social existence or the repeated renunciations that made his person and his art a glorious vestige, a ruin, or even the final setting of a blazing sun.

Mümtaz observed him, seated like anybody in the garden, under autumnal sunlight in his black garb, and he thought unwittingly of much-venerated virtuosi now resident in other worlds and masters who’d formed Emin’s seasons of the soul, about which the master himself scarcely knew a thing.

A Beethoven, a Wagner, a Debussy, a Liszt, or a Borodin was at such variance from this luminary of the literature sitting before him. They were possessed of maddening ire and vengeance, of desires that treated life in its entirety as a banquet spread before them, of a hubris taut with improbable Atlas-like exertions of the single-handed shouldering of such temperaments — of numerous theories and eccentricities that cast their personalities in various lights, and of natures, whose mildness alone cut like the swipe of a leonine claw. Meanwhile, the life of this little-known dervish consisted of repeated self-renunciations. Such denials, the resolve to twice disappear in absolutely reciprocal love and in the general commotion of being, weren’t things that solely concerned one such as Nuri. By perpetually pressing his persona — eclipsed by his own will, or by the cultivation of his culture — into the past, it was possible to uncover Ottoman musicians like an Aziz Dede, a Zekâi Dede, an İsmail Dede, a Hafız Post, an Itrî, a Sadullah Aǧa, a Basmacizâde, a Kömürcü Hafız, a Murat Aǧa, or even an Abdülkadir-î Merâgî; in sum, to reclaim one of our traits, and perhaps a genealogy of our most opulent sensibilities. These men preferred to live reclusively as single stalks within a bushel of wheat. They hadn’t driven themselves to the point of obsession, but through a pure ideal they were content to unleash numerous springtides out of the burgeoning and bleary incipience of their inner worlds; they recognized their art not as a means of avowing selfhood above all else, but as the sole path to vanishing in sempiternal oneness. Interestingly enough, their contemporaries also saw the matter this same way. The most individualistic of the lot, who by-the-by contaminated us with numerous maladies of the divine, the younger brother of Abdülhak Molla, in his diary, deigned to refer to Dede Efendi in such simplistic terms, as if ignorant of the import of his artistry, almost in a state of blithe ignorance. When İhsan one day lamented the vacuous material relating to the virtuoso Dede Efendi in Hafız Hızır İlyas Aǧa’s Reminiscences from the Inner Palace , his interlocutor Emin Dede replied, laughing, “My holiness, you’re barking up the wrong tree. . Others make art. We simply abide in a state of pure devotion. You know, in some religious orders having one’s name inscribed upon a tomb was considered bad form, let alone creating works of art.” This, you see, was the way of the East. According to Mümtaz, the East that was both our incurable affliction and our infinite strength! In this extraordinary renunciation, Emin Dede was the people’s last heir, one who might snuff out the lightning flash of his own existence were it within his power.

Emin spent a large portion of his pure and pristine life beneath the harsh wardship of his older brother. He didn’t indulge in alcohol or cigarettes and had no excesses. Very soon, they’d all witness him speaking as the voice of a civilization through humble observations. He told countless amusing anecdotes relating to masters like Aziz Dede, his actual mentor Neyzen Hüseyni Efendi, Cemil Bey, Zekâi Dede, and their forebears. Apparently Aziz Dede was a harsh, meticulous, portly, and unlettered master who was exceedingly chaste. One day, as the story went, he noticed that the pen he’d dipped into his inkwell bore no trace of ink, and interpreting the meaning of this portent, he resolved to embrace Allah through heart and devotion alone. By resting his ney onto his considerable paunch, which made him resemble certain mullahs, he simply played it wherever the urge struck him.

One night he’d entered a tavern around the Beylerbeyi ferry landing, thinking it was a coffeehouse, and after losing himself in the Bosphorus seascape, he was moved to improvise on his ney . Because he played with eyes closed, eyes that normally burned like two hearths beneath black, bushy eyebrows, he hadn’t noticed that the establishment had gradually filled and that a stream of spirit-soaking habitués had congregated at the table of spiritual inspiration, where they absorbed without a peep, and the waiters came and went on tiptoe to avoid disrupting him. When the taksim improvisation had concluded and Aziz Dede saw the crowd and the rakı glasses around him, he darted from his spot. Whenever he related this story, he ended with the following sentence: “My holiness, I felt such humiliation that I didn’t leave the house for three full days, and I was afraid to see any of the brethren for another month.”

Despite this, Aziz Dede’s disciple didn’t object to alcohol being drunk at the table. He only cautioned, “Don’t overdo it. Elation fills me today. .

One doesn’t see good Tevfik that often anymore! And be wary about plying Cemil with drink lest he slip up when he plays.” As he said this, the depths of his eyes smiled. He actually admired Cemil greatly. They’d come here on his insistence and after considerable rehearsal. Cemil made no secret of Mümtaz’s partiality to the Ferahfezâ and the Sultanîyegâh.

Emin Dede savored the blessings of the table. His older brother Vasfi, a master calligrapher, was renowned for his culinary prowess; his roast turkey in parchment was ballyhooed throughout Istanbul. They’d nicknamed the dish “turkey with death shroud” in the sybaritic sensibility of ancient Rome.

Yet he said nothing about the meal except for sparse words in praise of the sumptuous fare. Only when the pullets prepared according to his own brother’s recipe arrived at the table did he exclaim, “Doubtless your uncle Tevfik taught you how to prepare this delicacy!”

Tevfik, grinning: “If talents don’t pass from hand to hand, they wither. .” He’d been upset the entire afternoon. Activities with which he’d once easily occupied himself now strained him. He’d forgone all pursuits with a resentment brought about by senescence and limited physical activity. Now he recalled a creature that had reached a sclerotic phase in anticipation of death. As if out of his existence and surroundings he was preparing a sarcophagus of diversions. Traditional music was its most vivacious aspect; with each melody he remembered another day, but rather like something that wasn’t his, like this seasonal hour absorbing the bright sunlight of the luculent diamond over his head, enticing him by reminding him of mortality, a memento mori of faded leaves of garnet and agate, of distant pomegranate and Trabzon persimmon trees that he compared to a vanishing evening, and of the buzzing apiarian drone, not as something he experienced viscerally in flesh and blood, but only as a blessed cornucopia to which he was but an invited guest.