A Mind at Peace (38 page)

Orhan stretched lethargically. The sunshine was quite exquisite and comforting!

“Okay then, won’t all of this come about on its own over time? Or rather, aren’t these developments that will happen in time?”

“Impossible, because time changes according to context. The time of the growing child is different than that of the ill. We’re outside universal time. What I mean to say is that we must change our pace of time. We must catch up to the world. My perspective promotes our participation and progress as part of the procession even if we’re at the end of the line, so that from one particular path we might reach the promenade. Time is, doubtless, a factor, but one that’s different for the world and different for nations that have joined in the global workforce, and completely different for us in our present-day circumstances. If we just leave it alone, it won’t serve our interests but will pull everything down into the depths, as with others in our predicament. Instead of giving us wings, it’ll shackle our feet. No, as Shakespeare said, we have to sprint toward time. We have to grapple with it. We must persevere through our willpower. First we must acknowledge our circumstances. Then we must prioritize our tasks. Slowly and surely we must emerge into the global market. We must open our own markets to our own production. We must remake the family, houses, cities, and the village . . . As a consequence, we shall also remake humanity. Till now we haven’t been able to focus on the human factor in a constructive way; rather, we’ve pursued numerous social and cultural reforms. We’ve been trying to achieve the freedom of establishing political opposition within our society. From this necessity we now need to awaken to greater and more essential challenges. One can’t just keep on leveling the field. We need to erect an edifice on that field. What will this edifice be? Who knows the capacity of the new men and women of Turkey? We only know one thing: the necessity of relying on established roots. If we fail to do so, we won’t be able to move beyond a state of duplicity. Treaties and agreements are always risky. Tomorrow we might have to pay for the ease that they provide today through the obstacles they cause. We must be very explicit.”

Nuri was unable to restrain himself, “What do you mean by ‘explicit’? The situation strikes me as being so baffling that – ”

“On one hand we’re for better or worse attempting to appropriate a certain technique, to become people of a contemporary mind-set. As we adopt that mentality, by dint of circumstance, we have to discard traditional values. We’re exchanging models of social relations. On the other hand we don’t want to forget the past! What role does this past play within our present-day realities? Apparently, it’s only reminiscence or a nostalgia of sorts for us . . . It might ornament our lives! But what other constructive value could it possibly have?”

By ‘explicit,’ what do I mean?
he thought. Then he raised his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Besides, if I knew what should be done, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, my friend. I’d go down to the heart of the city and gather everyone around me. I’d shout like Yunus Emre, ‘I’ve come bearing your reality for you.’ This isn’t a matter that can be resolved by the first person who contemplates it. But, here as well, we can find a few things that need immediate attention. First, bring everybody together. So be it if the standard of living among them varies, it’s enough that they feel the urge for the same New Life . . . Suffice it that one group isn’t the mangled remnant of traditional culture and the other newly settled tenants of the modern world. We need a synthesis of both.

“Second, we need to establish a new relationship to our past. The former is relatively easy, we can achieve it by more or less transforming material conditions. But the latter can only be achieved through cooperation between generations.

“If we neglect the past, it’ll jut into us like a foreign object throughout our lives. Like it or not we have to make it part of the grand synthesis. It’s the source from which we must emerge. We need this notion of continuity even if it’s an illusion. Not to mention that we weren’t born just yesterday. The past constitutes our starkest reality. Now then, onto which of these roots do we make our graft? The folk and folk life are at times a treasure trove, at times a mirage. From a distance it appears like a limitless expanse. But on closer scrutiny, you’re limited to five or ten motifs and modes; or you’ll enter straightaway into fixed life forms. As for Ottoman classical or elite culture, we’ve broken free of that in many respects ... and anyway, the civilization to which it was bound has been destroyed.”

Mümtaz said, “This is precisely what I see as the impasse; because, as you’ve said, the past has no legs upon which to stand. Today in Turkey we wouldn’t be able to name five books that consecutive generations read together. Except in rare instances, those who take any pleasure in older authors are increasingly fewer in number. We’re seemingly the last link. Soon poets like Nedim or Nef’î, or even traditional music, which is ever so appealing to us, will join a category of things from which we’ve been estranged!”

“There are obstacles. But it’s not an impasse. We’re currently living through reactionary times. We despise ourselves. Our heads are full of comparisons and contrasts: We don’t appreciate Dede because he’s no Wagner; Yunus Emre, because we haven’t been able to cast him as a Verlaine; or Bâkî, because he can’t be a Goethe or a Gide. Despite being the most well-appointed country nestled amid the opulence of immeasurable Asia, we’re living naked and exposed. Geography, culture, and all the rest expect a new synthesis from us, and we’re not even aware of our historic mission. Instead, we’re trying to relive the experiences of other countries.

“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:

“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 ...”

“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
.”

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 . . .
”