Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Emin’s ney played the two yürük harmonies that completed the ceremony, then moved through a brief and multihued progression, a taksim that wandered the zodiac of melodic progressions as if sketching a map of the firmament, before moving from the distinct Ferahfezâ of twinned yürüks to the dominant melody of the prelude, a melody transfiguring everything in its midst into a furnace of desire, before falling silent.

Tevfik let the kudüm slip from his hands; he wiped his forehead. The gathering was exhausted, as if it had wrestled with a colossus, the deev of time. Emin called out to Tevfik, “You won’t be growing old anytime soon! Your future bears nothing of age!” They glanced at each other with affection, the pleasures of which younger generations knew nothing.

“Each of you is a miracle,” İhsan said.

Suad made an arrival toward the middle of the first selam. Though he’d passed through the door with a joyous expression, when he noticed the music and the solemnity of the scene, he sat silently beside İhsan in a manner that bespoke tedium. He sought Nuran and Mümtaz in the gathering, exchanging greetings through glances. From the horizon of intricate return to which the music had transported Mümtaz, he noticed Suad nearly snickering at him amicably, with a hint of derision, before staring at Nuran almost shyly and desperately. Then he severed all exchange with others and focused his attentions on the music. To such a degree that Mümtaz thought, What a pity he’s missed the initial Ferahfezâs . Toward the middle of the second selam , Suad’s concentration intensified. Resting an elbow on a knee, he placed his head on his right hand and began to listen, spellbound. But soon — as if unable to locate what he’d been seeking, as if the music offered only empty chalices, as if the climes that the ney and Tevfik’s voice explored in tandem amounted to only deceptive mirages — he raised his head in sedition. Mümtaz noticed the glimmer of caustic scorn and revolt, even wrath, in Suad’s eyes. He also caught Suad’s ogles, and not only were his emotions wrenched by a vague sense of jealousy, as had happened when Suad just now greeted Nuran, but he felt intimidated. Later on, while trying to gather his recollections of the evening, he considered how Suad’s expression had contorted like a forest under gust and gale. And Mümtaz considered how this restless forest had been illuminated by the lightning of revolt and fear in Suad’s gaze. Yes, he was convinced that such feelings lurked beneath the derision in Suad’s expression.

Mümtaz, distraught by Suad’s presence in their midst, was no longer jealous of him. His mind was nevertheless strangely preoccupied. Suad’s affections for Nuran and their friendship made him an agonizing part of Mümtaz’s life, elevating him to another plane; Suad, whom he’d long known, whose sarcasm and insolence unsettled and disturbed him, yet whose offhandedness and quirks he liked, whose intelligence and leaps of intellect he admired, but from whom he kept his distance because they traced different life trajectories. Consequent to the letter Suad had written Nuran, Mümtaz hadn’t spent three consecutive hours in which he hadn’t thought of him. From that day forward, Mümtaz sensed something resembling the lure felt by all victims toward their victimizers — felt by the sparrow toward the hawk. This wasn’t unnatural; as a French poet had put it, between them existed “the hidden allure of the deadly”; they’d confronted each other through Nuran’s love. Whatever the status of each in this love, between them arose something like malice. But now in the midst of the music, the revolt Mümtaz had seen overtaking Suad cast him in a different light. He asked himself repeatedly, I wonder what’s happened, what’s bothering him? Then the question became more explicit: What was he seeking in the music that sent him into such revolt? He again glanced at Suad. But this time he could discern no meaning or expression in his face. Suad again listened ever so politely in an open and even pitiless state of attentiveness — respectful toward the musical performance and to the musicians growing weary in its creation — yet revealing the depletion of his faculties of free thought. Suad’s indifference bothered Mümtaz as equally as his previous state of revolt and only through willful determination could he follow the finale.

While Mümtaz remained immersed in thought, Emin’s taksim improvisation, in the first selam , returned the Ferahfezâ with which the composer confronted listeners seven times, each through distinct variations, like a time span that now belonged to them — in the first instance simply as something sublime and unexpected, a self-discovery, next as a memory that furthered the conservation of an inner life, and consequently, increased its individuality and intensity. And Mümtaz realized that the suite of Ferahfezâs, arrived at by the neyzen like an inevitable conclusion, like the final station where one’s existence discovered its true face, helped constitute their identities — one end of which rested in shadowy presences interred in the measureless blackness of time-past; he realized he’d frequently relive the music along with the others, and, simply due to the sedition he’d observed in Suad, the ceremonial would rule his passions with a mystery illuminated by shooting stars and the glimmering whorl of nebulas.

If one doesn’t limit music to technical details or ideas, its effects are subjective. Undergirding each piece recollected in profundity are the peculiarities of the episode in which it was encountered; and in certain respects, the venture of this episode is but the transfusion of the music into one’s life.

During the Ferahfezâ ceremonial, Mümtaz, always taking the fugue with him, escaped into an array of phantasies relating to his surroundings, his inner self, and his mental processes. İsmail Dede’s melodies independently took refuge in the multihued, fragile, and fragmentary shapes and semblances of images congregating around Nuran’s face, which Mümtaz regarded from an arm’s length, images dispersing from her to the age of Sultan Selim III, to Shaykh Galip, to the era of Sultan Mahmud II, to Mümtaz’s own aestival reminiscences, to Kanlıca twilights, to the Kandilli hill, and to the astounding play of light on Bosphorus daybreaks. Had these visions remained restricted to the music that produced them, like flames in a hearth, they would have burned fleetingly and vanished. Not so. In the passing despair Mümtaz observed on Suad’s face, this complex of visions augmented — he realized that the true meaning of revolt, disdain, and ire that he thought he read in Suad’s expression was simply despair. And just as the melodies that emerged from the makam s of Sabâ, Nevâ, Rast, Çârgâh, and Acem resolved on the Ferahfezâ, just as the manifestation of that woeful, memory-laden suite prepared to bear and usurp the meaning of the totality of their lives, Suad’s despair appropriated all these visions, and by means of his own cruel experiences, introjected them into Mümtaz. Instead of the gradual dissipation — as with the other listeners when the ney ceased — of the dreamy twilight conjured around the music and the realm of color gradations evoking life in a spectral rainbow, this gloam settled even deeper into Mümtaz under the contingencies of augmented intensities and natures. And throughout the performance, no matter which stations his imagination attained as it orbited Nuran, this sense of despair, contracted from Suad, united with notions of Nuran.

Once the performance had concluded and Tevfik and Emin Dede again played compositions and semâi s flirting with the same makam , Mümtaz listened to these long-familiar works through the same despair. And even when he tried, as always, to distill Nuran’s voice, which accompanied her uncle’s, he conjured the phantom of a hindrance between her voice and himself. He perceived her voice from across great distances and through mist-shrouded dawns. The tense transfiguration that a la turca music caused in the expressions of its singers seemed not to be exertion but a sign of separation or distance. As if captive in climes of Sultanîyegâh, Mahur, and Segâh, Nuran was summoning him to rescue her. But Mümtaz couldn’t reach her.