a lonely impulse of delight

“Perhaps, you should accept this reality: There is no room in this world for a kind of perfection you pursue. Perfection exists only in an ideal. All ideals are dreams. And dreams are for boys.”

Looking out the window, I was parsing her words. Her sentences broke into individual words, and those words were swinging like multiple individual pendulums in different paces and directions — but never colliding into each other — in my head.

January in Istanbul is a brutal place for emotions. Everything is frozen. And movements are minimal. Only the waves of Bosphorus, the blades of the gushing sea wind, the traces of the ferryboats, and the feet of the bundled-up passersby maintain their calculated paces, cutting through the familiar scenery. A conglomerate of blurry lines. A still cut of a photograph taken by trembling hands. An ambivalent sight.

One’s emotions derive from the perceived certainty of a specifically designated paradigm in which one’s memory is being contextualised. When ambivalence sneaks into this absolute equation, a certain uncertainty presides over one’s memory. It leads one to doubt and to consider one’s memory unreliable. A fracture forms. A dangerous preposition.

No longer can one trust one’s own memory at this point, and the notion of certainty that all the events that weave one’s memory into an existence had taken place as one remembers. Was it really raining when I was walking on the Galata Bridge or was it just extremely foggy and damp so that I felt as though it was raining at the time? Was the sky dark blue because the sun had just set or because it was cloudy and the fluorescent street lamps were lit up under it? Was she really gazing into my eyes affectionately or was she simply politely attentive? Was she in love with me or was she just being curious about me? Was I in love with her?

Once a doubt settles in, a certain meaning the time and the space has held up up to that point uneasily begins to shift its position, and the validity of one’s emotions associated with them comes into question. And when one begins to question one’s emotions attached to them, one is no longer capable of living in the same time and space experience one’s memory had once allowed. The paradigm of one’s existence shifts. Then someone like Maria, a character in Albert Camus’s Le Malentendu, can no longer say in certainty, J'ai toujours tout aimé en toi, même ce que je ne comprenais pas et je vois bien qu'au fond, je ne te voudrais pas différent.

   A revisionist approach to the past may be a survival instinct. The more sensitive one’s soul is, the stronger an appeal it exudes. One edits, revises, redacts, or even rewrites the past. One instructs one’s own emotions to adapt to a revision of the past. Literary mediums are being called into to play a certain role. One discredits what one had once felt and adopts a new set of emotions based on a new revision of what had happened. One repeats this process as one expresses more on these new emotions. One begins to — and wants to — believe in them. This interpretation becomes the narrative, which eventually become the truth. The truth based on facts — only redacted.

The recorded history of mankind has been nothing but a perpetual war of comparative self-justification. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Code of Hammurabi, from the Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Sumerian cuneiform, from the Hebraic writings of the Pentateuch to the early Christian epistles and the Qur’an, from the Greek and Roman mythologies to the sagas of the Nordic deities, from Beowulf to the Canterbury Tales, from the Decameron to the Shakespearean theatres to the Chehovian dramas, from One Thousand One Nights to the Journey to the West, from La Chanson de Roland to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, from the Shahnameh to the Matnawiye Manawi, from the Saharawi poems to the Kangyur, from the Dine prayers to the Aztec and Mayan codices, from Magna Carta Libertatum to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the Declaration of Independence to La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen to the Communist Manifesto, from Inferno to Paradise Lost, from Richard Lovelace to Guillaume Apollinaire, from Leo Tolstoy to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir, from Anna Akhmatova to Nelly Sachs to Wisława Szymborska, from Vahan Tekeyan to Constantine Cavafy to Nazim Hikmet, from Elie Wiesel to Edward W. Said, the list goes on. All these writings and writers reflect and point out the tainted appearance of the collective delusional self that humanity has adamantly and obsessively held up even to the point of blinding itself. It is not a good or evil debate. Neither is it necessarily sickening nor is it essentially healthy. To some, self-justification hinges on an irreversible confrontation against a certain formidable evil, of which they consider it as posing a credible threat to the collective existence and meaning of humanity, yet to others, it is but an unquenchable pursuit for their egoistical thirst, only in which they find the sole purpose of humanity’s existence and meaning. And facts meet their precarious fates with the latter.

To them, the latter, division is a vital element of cohesiveness. They draw the maps, apply metrics down to millimetres, dabble colours, and cling on to titles. In order to make sure that the certain desired emotions are being applied, they are willing to go extra miles to make sure their memories — not only theirs, but even the collective memories of a people — will maintain the restricted frame of a certain image that they desire. It is the only narrative to be accepted. There cannot be alternatives. For them, feeling more righteous than other side is more important than being righteous, feeling stronger has more value than being strong, feeling more praised by people stirs a greater passion in them than being praiseworthy in their own eyes. They judge the value of the truth by the measurement of convenience and profits. Principles for them are but moveable miles posts. And they always seek and find justifiable scapegoats on whom they blame all the miseries, tragedies, and pains they themselves have created.

All societies driven by the latter exhibit some common symptomatic signs of human mind in its delusional state — both individual and collective.

“In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark, / And the living nations wait, / Each sequestered in its hate; / Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face, / And the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.” W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”.

ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται:

ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι, οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ

σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν

 Όμηρος

 I.

 The land carried his father’s name

And his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s

And his great-great-grandfather’s,

But his will it never.

 His image was hammered flat by the Akkadian sun

On the ancient Anvil of Badiyat al-Sham

And burnished by the grains of sand

Until his skin was shining like the dull edge of Naram-Sin’s axes,

Laying the foundations of Enlil’s temple waste in Nippur.

 He was a long way from his land, his home.

Far away from the Gutium’s menacing blades

Dripping with Enlil’s smouldering mirth,

Permeating with the sweet odour of his divine vengeance.

 II.

 You think the roses your father had planted in the backyard

Already bloomed?

My mother asked with her eyes fixed

To the only window in the hut, facing the north.

Perhaps, mama.

 Since when do we plant corpses in the charred garden

In which life was abruptly interrupted in its mundane repetition

And call whatever limbs sticking out its surface rose

Because their edges and points are covered in red?

 Do you remember how much he loved the French chocolates

Your sister had sent him from Paris

On his seventieth birthday?

Each chocolate was wrapped in a differently-coloured wrapping foil,

And after eating the chocolate, he flattened out

Each sheet of wrapping foil with his fingernail

Until it was all perfectly spread out

And there were wrinkles left no more.

Then he put them, with extreme care,

Like the most valuable treasure in the whole world,

In between the pages of that book,

That book by Rumi,

His favourite book.

Did you know that it was his favourite?

 Everyone knew that it was his favourite.

Samar and Fadwa, too.

And the chocolates were not French, to be exact;

They were Swiss.

Lindt.

But since Samar sent them from France where she lived,

To my family, they were French.

 Fadwa used to sneak into the father’s room and stole

His French chocolates from time to time,

And I caught her spreading out the wrapping foils

Just like my father would do immediately after eating them.

And she placed them in the father’s favourite book

Between those pages

Just like my father would do.

In fact, Fadwa was better at it — and faster — with her little nimble fingers

Than my father ever was with his thick feeble fingers in tremor.

Whenever she got caught by me, Fadwa gave me

That little mischievous look on her face with her cute, pouty lips sticking out,

Ahki, top secret, please.

 There were many talks of top secrets all around us.

Our president, our generals, our politicians,

They incessantly talked about government top secret missions

On the television and the radio.

People in the neighbourhood talked about some top secrets

They had heard from so-and-so’s from Damascus

Or from Homs or from Aleppo in hushed voices.

Children talked about those top secrets they had overheard

From their parents’ and family elders’ top secret conversations.

My little sister must have had heard and picked up the phrase

From her little friends in the neighbourhood.

Americans,

Turkey,

Iran,

Kurds,

Isis,

Kobane,

Aleppo …

Even my father’s French chocolates had become a top secret.

 I think my father had all along known Fadwa’s top secret.

I have my own suspicion that he had let her do that

Because he cared more about his perfect wrapping foil sheet collection

Than Samar’s French chocolates, to be honest.

 Often I wondered how Samar had managed to send

Her French chocolate boxes to us on each of my father’s birthdays

During those years of chaos, madness, and disorder.

Our president had issued a new stamp with his portrait on that one year,

But our postal service had stopped working long before that.

From Paris to Beirut,

From Beirut to Damascus.

Then there was a certain man from our crumbling neighbourhood

Who once or twice a month had journeyed to Damascus

To get our parcels and mail, medicine and other necessities.

Samar’s little package came with all its corners and edges

Crumpled, smashed, and with the evidence of tampering.

The small brown package had many red stamps all over it

From Paris,

From Beirut,

From Damascus.

So many stamps.

Even then the government bureaucracy was hard at work.

 Even Samar’s chocolates stopped coming.

Perhaps it must have had been too much an effort

Even for the chocolates to endure after all.

So had ended Fadwa’s top secret missions to my father’s room

As well as our government’s in the news.

Top secrets were no longer top secrets —

At home or abroad.

We all knew.

We had known about them all along.

 III.

 Life has a curious way of retelling the stories you already know

Back to you in a way you never knew possible.

And it does so when you least expect it.

 That year, Samar’s French chocolate had arrived a week earlier

From my father’s seventy-first birthday.

I had gone to the man’s house in the neighbourhood to pick up her package,

My mother was preparing for dinner

While my father and Fadwa were working in the backyard,

Tending to a single rose bush and a few tomato stems.

As I was about to leave the man’s house, the shelling began.

Everyone in the house ducked and crouched in different corners

While the soot and ashes from the ceiling poured on top of us.

We all wanted to run somewhere,

But we did not know where to run from where we were.

Where we were was just as good as any other places in the neighbourhood.

Someone was praying and calling for God’s help;

Out of my open mouth, only an indiscernible gagging noise came out.

Soon, I could not even hear my own noise.

Clutched tight in my hands against my chest was Samar’s French chocolate box

For my father — and for Fadwa.

 When the shelling had paused, I hurried home.

No light in the street.

No light nowhere.

The darkness was already fast descending upon the neighbourhood.

And when I arrived home finally,

There was a vast presence of destructive vacancy

Carved itself in among the space of the living.

The skeletal nakedness of a structure I once called home.

A panoramic view of the interior once separated by walls

From the entrance all the way to the backyard.

 In the dark corner of what used to be the kitchen,

My mother was sitting there, crouched, unmoving,

Her distraught and empty stare towards the sunken blackness

Where our backyard garden used to be.

No more rosebush.

No more tomato plants.

I approached my mother.

She did not look at me.

Her gaze still fixed to the direction of the garden.

She must have had felt my presence near her.

Her lips trembled, endeavoured to utter two words before shutting in silence:

Abuk …

Fadwa …

 She needed not to elaborate further.

I sat down next to her

In the same position and posture

With Samar’s French chocolate box

Still clutched in my hands.

One more week to my father’s seventy-first birthday.

At least, he did not go alone, said my mother.

There was no emotion detected in her voice.

No, he did not, replied I.

He will not be lonely;

She is with him.

 I opened Samar’s chocolate box

And handed it to my mother motionless next to me.

Her trembling fingers picked a chocolate,

Unwrapped it,

And put it in her mouth.

I did the same.

Like that, one by one,

We ate all Samar’s French chocolates, sitting there

And never looking at each other’s face

In silence.

 We never ate chocolates after that day.

 IV.

 I open Rumi’s book at times

When the darkness descends outside the window

Like a cloud of soot and ashes amidst shelling

And when the stars are lit in the night sky

Like luminous explosives before falling down.

 Since when do we rattle the night sky with metallic overture

By which people’s darting fates dance to the shrieking tune of destruction

And call their impeding proposition as Vicarius Filii Dei the stars and the moon

Because they, too, glitter and shine in our blind eyes?

 I no longer know what is right or wrong

Or if there is a god in the heaven

Or if there is a god who cares enough for all the stifling human affairs

That swing between frivolity and insignificance

Like a pendulum hanging at the end of a rotten rope.

 Had we truly been moulded in the image of certain gods,

After their image as some holy books declare,

Are they not after all the most horrendous conglomerate of

All that is ugly, cruel, greedy, selfish, and surreptitious

An image to be reflected upon?

 You have set up

A colourful table

Calling it life and

Asked me to your feast

But punish me if

I enjoy myself

 What tyranny is this

"Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; 

Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; 

Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all."

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (paragraph separations done by me.)

Lighted a cigarette under the hotel lobby roof. It began pouring down. The temptation of feeling that placid coldness of autumn rain against my bare head was too strong, and I finally gave in. I waved at the valet calling taxi for me, signalling that I no longer required his service. He gave me a quizzical look with both of his palms up. He obviously saw that I didn’t carry an umbrella with me. I briefly smiled at him and immediately walked right into the rain. In few seconds, the cigarette between my lips was naturally put out. As I was passing through the outer gate, the guard who knew me waved at me. He asked me the other night where I was from and was quite happy to know that I was from New York and am a writer residing in Ankara currently. These minuscule details that make one’s acquaintance to another more intimate. What connections he had probably made in his mind with these two simple facts of my life I perhaps would never find out.

A few minutes into the walk under the rain, my overcoat was soaked and the thin sweater underneath began absorbing the cold moist down to my bare skin. The initial contact made me instantly shudder. Well, exactly what I had expected. Taxies passing by me slowed down and honked at me. I didn’t turn my head to them. They sped away with exaggerated acceleration. A show of discontent at my non-reaction. 

Water flowing down hard on my face. Rain is a good remedy for a man who can no longer shed tears and whose stupidity is incurable and became a permanent fixture in his character. A vicarious infliction of relief. I bit my lips so hard they actually bled, discharging that copper taste into my mouth. Never again, I repeated in my mind. But somehow I didn’t even believe myself. Thought about that crazy Greek philosopher Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, those maddeningly frustrating eternal halves. That invincible distance between two objects, two beings. Never reachable, never attainable. Perhaps he was more a romanticist than a philosopher. Something reasoning, disputing Aristotle would never have had understood even with that big head of his.

By the time I had reached this café, not a single part of my body remained dry. A hot cup of coffee didn’t help. Now, I’m shuddering internally and feeling a fever coming down on me. Overextended myself for the past few weeks. Finally, a time to pay the price for it. It’s been too long since I last had anything like this. I might perhaps indulge it. A fever is a fever no matter where it’s coming from, right? 

"Don't you know?" 

He made a casual yet cautious blunder out of his assumptive question, lighting his cigarette, looking away as if to observe something that stole his attention for the moment. As if we were for the past hours discussing something that pertained to this out-of-blue question. Cars and pedestrians were passing by. People wore scarves and overcoats rather awkwardly still with their minds lingering in the memory of the past summer despite the fact that their bodies were currently exposed in the autumnal chill of the Central Anatolia. Almost as if they felt guilty or ashamed of having abandoned the idea of summer so readily. Nothing unusual, though. A typical Ankara street outside this café during Monday morning hours. 

"What?" 

He blew out his first drag, still gazing at that meaningless scene like some art displayed at Tate Modern. Goodness, when was the last time I was there?

"That you're making a bigger fool than you actually are by being that way?"

"You're talking about ... "

"It's no longer a secret," He cut off the mid-sentence. Not rude but very naturally as if to render a friendly service to lessen my inconvenience and continue my thought on my behalf. A typical diplomatic move that comes with his profession, showing no interest in hearing the obvious and predictable ending of one's sentence but charmingly further displaying his insight to it in doing so. "Among the social elites of this fabulous city. You make it look so obvious. You make it look so virtuous. As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue."

"I should expect more than a cheap line by a resenting wife in The Painted Veil from a former don of Magdalen."

"You actually call Maugham cheap?" He widened his eyes with a mocking exaggeration as a hint of smile, the quality of boyish mischievousness, spread on his thin lips. He knew W. Somerset Maugham was one of my favourites.

"No, I call your attempt of quoting my favourite author's celebrated line to actually instruct me cheap."

Both of us now burst into a quiet chuckle at the same time, trying not to draw any more unnecessary attention to ourselves than already has been as two foreigners conversing for hours in foreign language among these Turks. Monkeys in a cage, often it feels like. Then he resumed his enquiry in an even-lowered tone, shifting his position in the seat. I had my doubt that anyone sitting around us actually could understand our conversation—especially with his heavy British accent. But again, caution and secrecy are his occupational traits, if not hazards.

"You of all men” he contended. “Where is your tact? Where is your move? Where is that sophisticated ingenuity to lure and seduce women that you’ve been infamously known for? Why so blatantly obvious and foolishly honest with this particular one? It just baffles me. I thought you knew much better than that. I mean I know you do. Then again why?”

I put down my cup of coffee on the table. All of a sudden, it tasted much bitter than the previous sip.  I could hear the noise of cars speeding away and people chatting around us louder and clearer. A headache kicked in. Annoying and unnerving. This question was no longer diplomatic and pretty much in my face. I realised that my friend’s ernest enquiry into my mind and heart could not be satisfied and would certainly not be fended off with a few blundering attempts of humour. I lighted my own cigarette. And the first drag. I turned my gaze at the same scene my friend had lost his interest some moments ago or pretended that he was interested in until now.

“I'm assuming that we’re no longer discussing about the enormity of Sultan Erdoğan’s new Ottoman palace in A.O.Ç.”

He did not smile. He uttered no word. Just an intense stare directed at me.

“Isn’t love a task of one’s own heart? How one approaches love shows a great deal of his character and virtue, doesn’t it? You know that. You taught that. Maugham, yes, and Lawrence, Joyce, James, Proust, Woolf and many more. When one seeks purity in one’s essence, one needs to be humble before the beauty presented before him. There is no game there. Tacts and calculated moves are for games. I play no game with her and have no intention of playing one, either.”

“Were you less virtuous or less of character when you pursued others in the past? But you handled yourself much better than this one.”

“Handled myself better … sure,” I snorted. “I guess you’ve forgotten how far away from home I’m currently sitting to have coffee with you in this boring city and what it had taken to make this even possible.”

He quietly nodded gazing down at the table between us with a pondering look. He perhaps knew my personal history way too well to understand the intensity and enormity of what I had just said.

“Having said that,” I continued. “I think I accidentally saw a precious jewel in this heap of dung you just referred as social elites, and I’m willing to endure its nauseating odour just as long as I could observe and cherish this jewel at the closest proximity I’m allowed to even approach. I come undone before love, her. And what may come as a consequence of that, may it be.”

He looked up, tearing his gaze from the table. He shook his head in stern protest.

“Ever a hopeless romantic, aren’t you?” His sarcasm kicked in. “But all those talking heads? have you actually lost your mind? To expose yourself and even her as their gossip recipes? Have you considered her position and profession in this regard? Why she is here? If you truly love her, that is, you also know that she’s in no position to love you back. It’d be too inconvenient for her in her current disposition. She would never choose you even if she loves you. Any fool with a portion of his brain functioning can still figure this one out. But apparently you can’t, don’t or don’t want to.”

“And she has absolutely no obligation to respond or even acknowledge. She even made it clear to me. Additionally, she lacks no men wooing for her body and heart around her with gifts and flowers, offers and compliments. So a mere addition of this nameless man causes no more scandal than there already is—if there is any. After all, if a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.”

He rolled his eyes. “Quoting Kitty back to me.”

“The rules of épée, my old friend.”

“Touché.”

After a brief handsome grin, he sipped on his coffee. The porcelain of the cup was not thick enough to hold the temperature of dark liquid it contained for too long in this chilly morning. A slight frown he created on the bridge of his sharp nose as he was sipping his coffee indicated my assumption was valid. It must have been bitter and cold. 

“This city and its horrible coffee … O, what I’m really afraid of is — I have this intuitive gut feeling, you know,” he resumed. I wished that this topic was already over, but obviously nothing could distract him from this particular topic — neither good humour nor bad coffee — for the reasons unknown. “Soon you’d be repeating that famous line of Walter’s.”

Then immediately he motioned the waiter for another hot cup of fresh coffee brought to him. Walter Fane. Dr. Walter Fane. What was this morning’s conversation with love and its heavy reference to W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil? Though it is written lovely, this book is never an easy read for men. It erupts the darkest fear and stiff humiliation a man might feel about his woman. A selfish woman. A woman who exploits her beauty, charm and talents just to entertain her vanity through as many men as possible. A woman who marries a man for her immediate convenience. A woman who cheats on her husband for yet another frivolous emotional fling—out of boredom. A woman who carries the seed of that adulterous fling. A woman who after having witnessed and experienced the true love of her husband still goes back to her lover after her husband had met a tragic end. Many thoughts were passing through my mind as I was sitting there seeing my friend getting a new cup of coffee, fresh and steaming.

“I know.”

My friend’s eyebrows arched as he heard me saying it. 

“I know,” I repeated.

I’m a fool in love but not an ignorant fool. I’m well-aware of that, in fact. Entirely possible, what he had said. But as far as she is concerned, not even for one second, I considered her “silly and frivolous and empty-headed” or her aims and ideals “vulgar and commonplace”  or “second-rate.” She is not at all “ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid.” She is not frightened of my “intelligence” and I did not have to act “as big a fool as the rest of the men [she] knew.” But I also know if ever she would date me—or even marry me—for convenience, I love her so much, I would not care. Walter Fane is right. I completely sympathise with his thought on this particular part: 

“Most people, as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humoured affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection.” 

That is exactly how I feel around her. And the fact that you have someone like that in your life, even that is a gift, isn’t it? “What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favour.” And I am not even her husband. I am nothing to her. Nothing.

“So, what are you going to do about this?” He wondered out loud to me.

“Nothing,” I smiled back at him. “It’s perfect as it is.”

"Or a perfect mockery," he snapped.

After we finished our breakfast, we stepped out of the café. In a few minutes of walking down the street talking about his new post, my book and Edward, a siren went off. Both of us stood still. 10 November. 9:05 a.m. I did not have to check my wristwatch to know the exact time even. In memory of the founding father of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The time of his passing. Interestingly though, no one else except us two lanky awkward foreigners in this land bothered to stand still for the moment. One driver who stopped his car in the middle of the road was honked and cursed at by other drivers behind him for causing a standstill. 

I slightly leaned over to my friend and whispered into his ear, “See, even doing the most virtuous thing you should do at the right hour becomes a sheer mockery in this fucking country. Isn’t it interesting? No virtue ever passes through this life without mockery. And love? It’s a foolish comedy until someone writes about it and becomes a bestseller.”

He looked askance at me, then burst out laughing. 

“Yes, yes, write a book, my friend. Please, write a good one for me. And make sure you give me a free signed copy. Free, I emphasise.”