A Mind at Peace (39 page)

“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.”

III

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:

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.