A Mind at Peace (40 page)

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.

Emin went on to describe his avid interest in gastronomic delights and the sumptuous feasts he’d once hosted. With the same distinguished and essential human joviality, he recounted, mirabile dictu, the characters of old Mevlevî lodges, the chef-cum-dervishes that he’d personally known, and the lamb pilaf banquets they’d held. As Mümtaz listened to him he thought,
So the
a la turca
style that so repulses us is really something else altogether . . .
Then the topic passed to Nuran’s father. Emin knew full well about the ornamental plate designs and calligraphy that he’d made for the Yildiz ceramics factory. He himself was a calligrapher besides. Some claimed that if not for the iron rule of his older brother, he would have honed this talent. Mümtaz, listening to Emin’s discussion of arts and music, noticed that he always maintained an earnestness close to folk sensibilities without any notable aesthetic discernment. His tolerance toward styles late to enter Turkish tastes and traditions, rather degenerating them, also arose from this humility. This Mevlevî possessed of politesse had come of age amid changing sensibilities, feeling in his being the reverberation of every new stirring. Thereby he had no desire to seek out and feel pure forms of the past, which had entered our tastes through the poet Yahya Kemal. Just as the previous generation displayed a regard, which approached the esteem of proponents of classical verse, for a
gazel
written in the ornate language of the fin de siècle Servet-i Fünun school, Emin simply resigned himself to various transformations in writing, painting, and music. He wasn’t one to make comments by interpreting particular themes on the subjects he broached. He rarely indulged in such rhetoric. Despite this, he instinctively knew how to be discerning. However he’d managed to protect himself from the transformations in tradition with respect to calligraphy or music, he similarly guarded himself in his oratory. He spoke of his art with the care of a meticulous artisan, without any jargon, and, though unwittingly, he became the center of gravity of the table and the gathering. For his sake, Macide had forgone the visit to her lamented daughter beneath a canopy of white clouds and had been liberated from her anxieties regarding Mümtaz’s final fate; meanwhile, Nuran had surrendered herself to this experienced master, to an affection for patriarchs and elderly men that dominated her life, and to an accompanying sense of deference. By admiring and listening to Emin Dede, she felt the absolution of countless sins and transgressions.

Claiming it would upset his stomach, Emin Dede declined the offer of ice cream. He concluded his meal with nothing but a demitasse of traditional coffee without sugar, as dictated by custom.

IV

The houseguests truly came to savor Emin Dede’s exception when he began his
ney
performance in the second-floor hall, where they’d retired after the meal. Few musicians could thus transform to assume postures dictated by virtuosity.

First he inquired of Tevfik, “My lordship, are you up for performing the Ferahfezâ?” Tevfik hadn’t recited this piece in years. But he was up to the challenge; this amounted to revisiting his youth in a completely unexpected season. During Emin Dede’s introductory
taksim
improvisation, Tevfik rummaged through his memory for the ceremonial piece that he’d added to his repertoire while yet in the civil service. Thereafter,
kudüm
drums in hand, he waited half recumbent on the sofa, in that peculiar position necessitated by
a la turca
instruments when seated cross-legged, one foot adangle.

Emin Dede briefly made the rounds of the various melodic progressions and then embarked upon Dede Efendi’s
peşrev
instrumental prelude in the rhythmic cadence of
devr-i kebir
. Mümtaz had heard this piece played a few times by Cemil. But now it issued before him as a completely different fugue. Beginning with the first notes, a strange yearning, nay, pining overwhelmed them in its resemblance to lust for the sun amid thousands of deaths; then, without any dissipation of the effect – Mümtaz regarded the particular substantiation of Nuran before him through this sensation – they were scattered about leaf by leaf in an autumn eerie and eternal.

A serene pool in whose waters floated reflections of gilded firmaments, large bronzed leaves, and extraordinary water lilies, expanded in an unknown dimension, perhaps – yes, without a doubt – in a dimension of their own selves.

Emin Dede’s
ney
, with no wane in timbre of breath or wind, in a metallic or, more precisely, idiosyncratic and variegated crescendo, emitted a tone in which cohered the sparkle of gemstones and the pliancy of foliage. Yet how resonant, voluminous, and broad. The music filled the large hall, gushed out windows, and through its effect the garden, overcome by the remorse of final flowers and yellowed leaves, was effectively transfigured. At times everything melted as if reverting to its own essence and from there to a more profound quintessence; beneath the cascade of sound resembling a deluge of roses, the small chandelier hanging from the ceiling blazed in stunning rainbow spectra, and then, with a brazen hairpin bend – or, with that implausible and entwined climb seen only in ivies, wisteria, and fine fibrous plants that conformed to shape without relinquishing any color – it was born of its very self as the ostinato of a short while before. As Mümtaz sought out Cemil’s
ney
amid his master’s voice, the first section, or
hane
, came to an end. The second
hane
pranced out of the melancholic nostalgia conjured by this denouement in a more solemn tone. Yet again they were spirited away by repeated gusts, passed through squalls of the soul, and regarded their solitude in the mirror of drastic yearning – lo, the anxiety that all was lost in perpetuity. And the Ferahfezâ
peşrev
, or the soul attempting to forge impassable deserts of seclusion, plunged for a fourth time into nostalgic
hüzün
, that crepuscular realm that blazed beneath water.

Each listener was seemingly scattered by the gale of a life span. Only Emin Dede remained standing in his meticulous and straightforward outfit, his expression hardened, like a symbol, a personification of the sentinel of mystery and melody. The entire secret of being that was centered in himself rested in the physical firmness of his inner countenance; beside him a bit to the rear, Artist Cemil, with his fair Saxony bone-china countenance and its sweet smile, though slightly narrower than before, seemed to gaze over the terrain they’d just now passed. Opposite them, Tevfik waited,
kudüm
on lap, in that disconcerting discomfort that
a la turca
instruments added to his reclining form.

Unable to restrain himself, İhsan said in a very soft voice, “My dervish, you possess an exquisite palette of colors . . .”

Emin Dede, with an eye on Tevfik, who was prepared to play his
kudüm
drums, answered with the glance of a true
neyzen
and in the same soft voice: “My Holiness, forget not the succor of the master . . . furthermore, what you refer to as ‘color’ in our lamented Dede Efendi, I’d actually call ‘love.’” Emin didn’t just refer to old virtuosi and patrons as if they were still in our midst, he erased both the remoteness of their deaths
and
his self through deferential terms like “our master,” “our elder,” or “our lord,” thereby unifying himself, his life, the master to whom he alluded, and the abstract time of death.

But the true marvel began with the Mevlevî musical rite itself.

Dede Efendi’s Ferahfezâ ceremonial was not simply devotion or the striving of a faithful soul seeking Allah. It was arguably one of the most rambunctious pieces of music that never abandoned the secret, the élan vital, the very traits of mystical inspiration, and the express, compelling impetus of immense and unyielding desire. Emin Dede had so managed its progression, which consisted of roaming the
makam
s of
a la turca
music with small flourishes, transformations, and resolutions, that the ceremonial inherently transformed into a symbol all its own.

After revealing the entirety of the Ferahfezâ
makam
’s attributes in the first two couplets of Rumi’s
Mesnevi
, which began the ceremonial like two bejeweled façades of a single palace – “Hear the lament of the
ney
whisper stories of separation/Since I’ve been pulled from the reed bed men and women weep at my wailing” – within varied phrasal arcs resembling a prolonged excursion, he ran the
makam
a number of times, in an arrangement that resembled distinct variations achieved through consistent structural motifs, before slowly abandoning the melodic progressions to associated ones. Thereby the entire ceremonial sequence, in the first lines – or couplets – became a universal journey of sorts within the lust of the lucid and majestic Ferahfezâ that struck the ear; the ear, which never forgot such delicacies, or rather the soul, which never forgot the yearning for transcendence bedazzling it such that acoustic sense and soul grew ecstatic in the conviction of the measure-by-measure approach of desire and delight. However, as soon as this satisfaction was revealed, the eternal longing, the journey, began anew in the softer or simply variant tenor of the Nevâ, the Rast, or the Acem. Apparently, Dede Efendi wanted to manifest the complete predestined course of mystical experience through this bewildering piece. Ephemerally, absolute spiritual truth, or the spirit that was absolute truth, sought itself and its purpose in expansive time and space, disturbed the dormancy of material objects, bowed toward the essence of all things, withdrew into great seclusions, bounded over Milky Ways, and everywhere discovered desires and thirsts akin to its own. It passed from the tenor of the Acem, revealing the Ferahfezâ
makam
to be all but a “rightly guided path” of sorts, to the Dügâh, the Kürdî, the Rast, the Çârgâh, the Gerdaniye, the Sabâ, and the Nevâ; all things were lost, sought, and found within each of them. And the Ferahfezâ, during the entirety of this journey of febrile yearning, extended its bejeweled chalice – that chalice of a singular lyrical line and flourish – at surprising junctures, appearing now like a kaleidoscopic vision, now as a memory or dream of its own self. This quest, this dissolution and self-realization, was at times exceedingly humanist, and Dede’s inspiration either exclaimed, “So what if you remain unseen, I bear you within my being!” or fell into desperation as dense as matter.

Yet Rumi was justified: Yearning was the solitary secret of the
ney
. Should someday one make a daring, synesthetic interpretation of Turkish instruments similar to that made by Rimbaud for vowels in the poem “Voyelles,” doubtless one would most certainly see in this simplest of
a la turca
instruments the flesh-hued longing of nightfall. The
ney
should be untainted by the sounds of European or
a la franga
flutes, horns, and even the deep emerald green or blood red timbre of the remarkable hunting strains that have for centuries delineated bestial dispositions. In their need to re-create or rediscover nature in new ways, such instruments often forsake the very longing that ought to be one of art’s true domiciles. For the
ney
articulates by usurping the place of the nonexistent, by pursuing that very absence.

Why does desire comprise the lion’s share of our spiritual lives? Do we pine for the oceanic expanse, one droplet of which constitutes each of us? Are we in the pursuit of the quiescence of matter? Or do we bemoan ephemeral and long-vanished aspects of ourselves because we’re children of time, an amalgam prepared in the crucible of time, or because we’re victims of time? Do we genuinely seek a state of perfection? Or do we object to the cruel order of time:
zalim zaman nizamı
?

Ottoman music is perhaps the art form that best articulates desire through an arrangement that disrupts what it has created and reduces, with a cursory glance, the dais of time known as the present to nothing but ephemera – the
ney
being its most eloquent implement.

Perhaps İsmail Dede Efendi, feeling such yearning in his soul, began his ceremonial with couplets on longing from the
Mesnevi
. The four-stepped threshold of the
devr-i kebir
talea sufficed to deliver the listener to the realm’s doorstep. For here, traditional music, as with the
peşrev
, didn’t just satisfy itself with affect; it seized and extracted one from one’s place, transforming and shaping one into a kind of vessel whose body and soul would accept deaths of a different magnitude, deaths beyond this world yet full of reminiscences – an echo of sorts. No, this was neither the realm of a moonlit Büyükdere night, of chalices of light shattering across molten emerald and agate, nor of saffron roses scattering petal by petal. The yearning in their presence emerged from beyond a thousand deaths and was directed at all animate things. Therefore, it had no sharpness, no points. Nuran seemed to perpetually awaken anew in an unknown locale, then within the rhythm of the fire dance, suddenly and repeatedly transfigured through inscrutable incarnations before again drawing one of the heavy and excessively gilded clouds over herself at a refrain in the
makam
s, under which she’d descend into an enchanted sleep, before yet again slipping away beneath one edge of this heavy shroud as if she were a coral and yellow artery of light, filtering from the clouds of an evening; involuntarily she gathered again in another place, and again in her exceptional dance became a realm of pure essence, expanded, grew, fragmented, laughed in matter estranged from herself then again as herself, multiplied, pushed the thresholds of improbability, and therein scattered one leaf and one branch at a time like a freshly bronzed autumn. If not for the plodding accompaniment of the
kudüm
, which reached them from subterranean depths as it cast off the ashes of hundreds of thousands of deaths, perhaps she would have flown free completely and vanished, together with the totality of her hylic being. The deep rhythm, however, amid entities transfiguring at each moment, pointed the way for a self no longer hers through the invitation of a time no longer ours, and through wondrous percussion parted certain shrouds in the depths; indeed, Nuran, following in its percussive wake as if she were the counterpart of a twinned soul, sought her self, her other half, perhaps even her totality, in the malleability of this realm of pure essence.